RodSteward: A Design-to-Assembly System for Fabrication using 3D-Printed Joints and Precision-Cut Rods

Abstract: We present RodSteward, a design-to-assembly system for creating furniture-scale structures composed of 3D printed joints and precision-cut rods. The RodSteward systems consists of: RSDesigner, a fabrication-aware design interface that visualizes accurate geometries during edits and identifies infeasible designs; physical fabrication of parts via novel fully automatic construction of solid 3D-printable joint geometries and automatically generated cutting plans for rods; and RSAssembler, a guided-assembly interface that prompts the user to place parts in order while showing a focus+context visualization of the assembly in progress. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our tools with a number of example constructions of varying complexity, style and parameter choices.