Meeting notice: The 01.10.16 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal 
East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. 
and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll 
probably know where we are.  More details below.

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Suggested topic: Feature Recognition

It is not at all rare to see features arising in the technological 
landscape that are clearly assembler- enablers. One we have discussed is 
the ongoing revolution in stateful valves -- equipping control elements 
like motors or switches or pumps with sensors, ports, and actuators so that 
the element can be moved, autonomously or remotely, through a range of 
values.  (Among other applications, stateful valves make maintenance 
cheaper, since control elements with sensors can listen to, report on, and 
accommodate their conditions.)  Obviously any kind of nanomanufacturing 
will require control values with lots of state.

Another example is the impressive progress now being underreported in 
feature recognition - - equipping CAD programs with enough intelligence to 
generate NC codes appropriate to the features (holes, slots, pockets, 
bosses, fillets) in a given design. 

The problem itself is an old one, the subject of many master's and Ph.D. 
theses over the last 20 years.  What has changed enough to make it sensible 
to develop commercial products has been the general adoption throughout 
industry of 3D solid modeling tools.  Almost as a by- product, these tools 
generate information about what's outside or inside, what's between or 
around, designed objects.  A program can now ask questions about the 
presence of voids inside cubical shapes, for instance, and expect to have 
them answered.  This data is what makes feature recognition viable.

Once the recognition routines are finished, tool paths are calculated by 
running the features through a database containing speeds, feeds, tool 
behaviors, the nature of workpiece materials, and tolerance data.   It is 
easy to imagine a world in which specialized CAD/CAM data vendors supply 
this data as needed over the net.  The result would be something close to 
affordable 'point and click' manufacturing, with its promise (among other 
goodies) of smart, interactive, cost estimating.  (Early adoptor 
manufacturers are for many purposes almost there now for relatively simple 
features, such as forms with vertical sides.)  We seem to be close to a 
world in which design engineers will be able to consult a running cost-of-
manufacture estimate in real time as they work.  Down the road a bit, 
feature recognizers might end up organizing the manufacturing chain itself, 
directly.  As Mark Albert wrote in Modern Machine Shop Online 
(www.mmsonline.com/articles/040101.html): "The world will be your factory; 
the Internet, your global DNC system".


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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: 
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.
	
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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on 
the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, 
which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

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