CS Prof and team devise method to 3D print models that balance or breakdance

prevost16balancing-teaser_0.jpg

3DPrint.com is featuring a story about the recently published research which was co-authored by CS Professor Wojciech Jarosz in collaboration with Romain Prévost and Moritz Bächer of Disney Research and Professor Olga Sorkine-Hornung of ETH Zurich.

The team was interested in developing an automatic way to aid users to 3D print objects that can balance on their own. They developed a method that could ensure a 3D printed figure could not only retain a solid center of gravity while standing, but could also effortlessly balance on its head or side. The trick to achieving multiple seemingly incompatible balancing objectives was to embed small metal spheres inside the printed object. As the object is rotated into different poses, these metal spheres would shift inside the object, affecting its center of mass. The computational approach would determine the correct number of spheres, and the hollowed-out capsules within which they would move, to ensure maximum stability in various poses.

The research was presented last week at the International Symposium on Vision, Modeling, and Visualization, in Bayreuth, Germany.

Check out the 3DPrint.com article here for more details, or head to the project website to read the full academic paper or watch the accompanying video.