Automatic generation of object shapes with desired functionalities.

Functional design of objects is slow and still largely an artisanal activity, with few Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools existing to aid the exploration of the design solution space. In order to accelerate object design, we introduce an automatic method for generating object shapes with desired functionalities. We employ the concept of shape arithmetic, where shapes are manipulated in an arithmetic fashion inside a latent space representation learned by a neural network. We propose a functionality arithmetic, with the aim of conceiving new objects with desired functionalities from other objects with known functionalities. This is done by first extracting the descriptions of forms providing these functionalities, and then manipulating them using shape arithmetic functions. Form-to-function mappings are extracted by identifying the common features between objects belonging to the same class, inside which all objects provide the same functionality.