AddUp releases updated Trajectory Generator developed with Inria
January 21, 2021
AddUp, Clermont-Ferrand, France, has released an updated version of the AddUp Trajectory Generator, developed in partnership with Inria, the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, Le Chesnay Cedex, France.
Currently the standard for AddUp FormUp users, the AddUp Trajectory Generator is a fast slice & toolpath generator, unveiled at Formnext 2019.
With over 3500 researchers and engineers, Inria is a leading reference institute for digital science and technology. AddUp partnered with Inria computer graphics experts behind IceSL, a highly efficient hybrid CPU-GPU slicer, and together they developed and integrated advanced algorithms that are said to bring unprecedented slicing & toolpathing performance in the AddUp Trajectory Generator.
“The slicing & scanning trajectory computation speed is around 1000 x the build speed of these trajectories,” commented Damien Artignan, Assistant Head of Industrial Software Department, AddUp. “When you consider time spent by engineers, simply waiting for computing to be done, this is a real game changer.”
These performances are achieved through innovative algorithms and efficient parallelisation on multi-core CPUs. Computing on CPUs can seem antiquated when the hype is about GPU computing, but CPUs bring unique and crucial advantages explains the AddUp.
Guillaume Pascal, AddUp Manager Product Owner, stated, “PBF [Powder Bed Fusion] toolpath generation produces a lot of data that must be sent to scanners or be saved to files. This leads to many I/O between RAM and VRAM that add a processing time to the pure GPU computing time, having a low net gain. In addition, maintainability and evolutivity are simpler on CPUs. Finally, the CPU approach does not require specific vendor hardware.”
In addition, slicing performance scales naturally with the number of CPU cores: from home laptops to many-core desktop CPUs, the slicer makes the best use of the target platform capabilities.
The new version of AddUp Trajectory Generator now offers smooth upskins and downskins generation, to obtain an unprecedented part surface quality. This new feature is said to strengthen the existing list of operators available for visual strategy trees, a unique approach for Additive Manufacturing strategies creation.
“Thanks to the visual strategy tree definition, unlimited combinations of operators and parameters are given to our users, while no programming skills are needed,” added Mathieu Roche, Software Product Manager at AddUp. “With such a rapid learning curve, our customers can be focused on production from day one.”
