Mass customization: Reuse of topology information to accelerate slicing process for additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) can build objects with complex features with little extra effort, opening up potentials to realize mass customization. Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) prints object in a continuous fashion, leading to extremely high productivity and consequently enabling mass customization. CLIP adopts a large number of images as input, which poses a fundamental challenge in layer generation. The slicing procedure for a single customized model can take tens of minutes or even hours to complete, and the time consumption becomes more prominent in mass customization context. Motivated by the similarities among the customized products, we proposed a new slicing paradigm. It reuses topology information obtained from the template model for other customized products from the same category. The idea of topology information reuse is implemented at three levels, including self reuse, intra-model reuse, and inter-model reuse. Experimental results show that the proposed slicing paradigm can significantly reduce the time consumption on pre-fabrication computation, and ultimately fulfill mass customization enabled by AM.