Touch-RE: A Touch-based Model Acquiring Method for Personal Manufacturing

Enabled by additive manufacturing technology, personal manufacturing, if realized, will give ordinary people control over their physical world by allowing them to personally program its construction. Currently several pioneering mass customization and personal fabrication applications have been developed for consumer products, gifts, toy, etc. However, one of the core challenges that are remained to be addressed for realizing personal manufacturing is the easiness of creating 3D models for additive manufacturing systems. Current developments in CAD software and reverse engineering are still lacking on the easiness of usage especially for normal users without much experience. In this paper, we present a touch-based 3D-shape acquiring method that is easy and intuitive to use. The key technical challenges on the related hardware and software development are discussed. A testbed system is presented and multiple examples are given to demonstrate its capability.