Automated manufacturing architectural millwork
OwnerRobert Anthony Bakerinventor
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A system and method for making made-to-order architectural millwork of custom dimensions; including the design of wood joints and a system for deploying them within the overall structural design of individual architectural millwork units, as well as methods for online design and ordering, automated writing of machine code, robotic part preparation, and simplified on-site installation. With the automation and generation of digital code for manufacturing custom architectural components, this method makes the formation of distributed manufacturing centers possible. Through this method and with minimum re-tooling and/or training, these centers are able to produce custom millwork more efficiently and effectively than traditional custom millwork woodshops.
Claims12
A computer program product for designing a unit, embodied on a non-transitory computer-readable medium, the non-transitory computer-readable medium comprising program code that, when executed, causes a computer to perform the steps of:
- providing, to a user, a user interface comprising a design interface;
- receiving, from the design interface, a plurality of unit parameters for the unit, the plurality of unit parameters comprising at least two of:
- a type of the unit, a length of the unit, a height of the unit, a width of the unit, a depth of the unit, a number of doors of the unit, a number of other peripherals of the unit, and a number of adjacencies of the unit;
- generating a manufacturing model from the plurality of unit parameters received from the design interface, wherein the generated manufacturing model is modeled as a set in a network of sets comprising at least one parent set and a plurality of child sets, the at least one parent set corresponds to an overall space, each parent set has at least two corresponding child sets, and each child set has one corresponding parent set;
- computing, from the manufacturing model, two or more constituent parts that make up the unit;
- writing a manufacturing file comprising the two or more constituent parts computed from the manufacturing model;
- arranging the two or more constituent parts spatially in a workspace to minimize waste of manufacturing material during manufacture;
- transmitting the manufacturing file to one or more manufacturing centers;
- ordering the two or more constituent parts to be delivered;
- executing the manufacturing file when received by an automated manufacturing tool to produce the unit from the two or more delivered constituent parts;
- wherein the manufacturing file is generated from the manufacturing model.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.