Can any model be fabricated? Inverse operation based planning for hybrid additive-subtractive manufacturing
Yongxue Chen, Tao Liu, Yuming Huang, Weiming Wang, Tianyu Zhang, Kun Qian, Zikang Shi, Charlie C. L. Wang
公開日: 2025/9/12
Abstract
This paper presents a method for computing interleaved additive and subtractive manufacturing operations to fabricate models of arbitrary shapes. We solve the manufacturing planning problem by searching a sequence of inverse operations that progressively transform a target model into a null shape. Each inverse operation corresponds to either an additive or a subtractive step, ensuring both manufacturability and structural stability of intermediate shapes throughout the process. We theoretically prove that any model can be fabricated exactly using a sequence generated by our approach. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, we adopt a voxel-based implementation and develop a scalable algorithm that works on models represented by a large number of voxels. Our approach has been tested across a range of digital models and further validated through physical fabrication on a hybrid manufacturing system with automatic tool switching.