DESIA: A General Framework for Designing Interlocking Assemblies
Interlocking assemblies have a long history in the design of puzzles, furniture, architecture, and other complex geometric structures. The key defining property of interlocking assemblies is that all component parts are immobilized by their geometric arrangement, preventing the assembly from falling apart. Computer graphics research has recently contributed design tools that allow creating new interlocking assemblies. However, these tools focus on specific kinds of assemblies and explore only a limited space of interlocking configurations, which restricts their applicability for design. In this paper, we propose a new general framework for designing interlocking assemblies. The core idea is to represent part relationships with a family of base Directional Blocking Graphs and leverage efficient graph analysis tools to compute an interlocking arrangement of parts. This avoids the exponential complexity of brute-force search. Our algorithm iteratively constructs the geometry of assembly components, taking advantage of all existing blocking relations for constructing successive parts. As a result, our approach supports a wider range of assembly forms compared to previous methods and provides significantly more design flexibility. We show that our framework facilitates efficient design of complex interlocking assemblies, including new solutions that cannot be achieved by state of the art approaches.
pubs_teaser.png
Thumbnail
openaccess
copyright
1 MB
PNG
9f1cd469b67baa7c280b1d2c2398ebd8
paper.pdf
postprint
openaccess
copyright
20.97 MB
Adobe PDF
f5a37beebcb9599a8862aefb80792747