Michael Ungar shows how smart nesting automatically arranges parts to maximize material and strength, then scales up to coordinate entire machine fleets with load-leveling and automated material handling. Linking design versions directly to machines enables parallel testing and faster iteration cycles.
When you think about automation, it's what are the things that you can do that the computer can do better and that we can speed up a process. For example, if you're going to print many parts, one of the things you want to do is not just print one at a time. You want to nest them inside of the volume of the material. So nesting is something that we can automate and logically lay out how things are going to be built. We can look at when we're doing that nesting to make sure we've got the part as it's being manufactured, that it's oriented in the right direction. So you're getting the maximum sort of Z strength or tensile strength to be able to hold things together. We're looking at how do we take manufactured parts, if you will, or small lot manufactured end-use parts, and how do we think about these machines as a series of machines working together in parallel? So how do we do load leveling? of what parts get built where inside of a, I'll call it an additive manufacturing sort of facility, if you will. Yeah. We can do, think about all the monitoring required to make sure that we don't run out of raw material. How do we automate the loading and unloading all the parts that come in there? As we're looking and iterating in the front end of the process, how do we go and iterate on the design side and say, okay, that's iteration 1 that's gonna print on that machine, iteration 2 is gonna print on that machine, So we can take things and try and parallelize them so we can then do real-time testing to be able to, you know, to shrink and parallelize activities together.
