ABSTRACT
The last ten years have seen the birth and successive growth and flowering of a new scientific discipline and accompanying technology: rapid prototyping. Rapid prototyping can briefly be described as the fabrication of a physical model directly from a 3D CAD design. Where the production of a prototype with classical techniques might readily take a few weeks this now can be shortened to days or even to hours: hence the term 'rapid' prototyping. At the moment two main techniques can be discerned. First we have LMT: Layer Manufacturing Technique (additive fabrication as e.g. Stereolithography) where the physical model is built by adding material layer by layer. The second technique (subtractive fabrication such as milling, cutting etc.) is more closely associated with classical techniques in that it removes material step by step. This last technique is used at the Subfaculty of Industrial Design Engineering in the SRP (Sculpturing Robot Project), see e.g. Vergeest and Tangelder (1996), where a CAD/CAM software controlled six degree-of-freedom foam milling robot is applied for the rapid prototyping of free form surfaces.
