Deep Neural Implicit Representation of Accessibility for Multi-Axis Manufacturing

One of the main concerns in design and process planning for multi-axis additive and subtractive manufacturing is collision avoidance between moving objects (e.g., tool assemblies) and stationary objects (e.g., part unified with fixtures). The collision measure for various pairs of relative rigid translations and rotations between the two pointsets can be conceptualized by a compactly supported scalar field over the 6D non-Euclidean configuration space. Explicit representation and computation of this field is costly in both time and space. If we fix O(m) sparsely sampled rotations (e.g., tool orientations), computation of the collision measure field as a convolution of indicator functions of the 3D pointsets over a uniform grid (i.e., voxelized geometry) of resolution O(n3) via fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) scales as in O(mn3 logn) in time and O(mn3) in space. In this paper, we develop an implicit representation of the collision measure field via deep neural networks (DNNs). We show that our approach is able to accurately interpolate the collision measure from a sparse sampling of rotations, and can represent the collision measure field with a small memory footprint. Moreover, we show that this representation can be efficiently updated through fine-tuning to more efficiently train the network on multi-resolution data, as well as accommodate incremental changes to the geometry (such as might occur in iterative processes such as topology optimization of the part subject to CNC tool accessibility constraints).& COPY; 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.