Performance-aided Design Approach at Autodesk Research: Design and Make of a Flying Vehicle

As part of Autodesk's 40-year journey, we’ve invested heavily in understanding and pushing the boundaries of design and make through original research. Our dedicated industrial research lab, Autodesk Research, seeks to explore the new technologies and innovations by looking as far as five to ten years out, to find the right solutions that can help our customers design and make a better world for all. We ground our work in several key research domains which represent areas or industries that we believe have the most potential for transformation in design and make. One of these areas is performance-aided design research.

One of the greatest challenges in product design is when products fail to perform in the real world as designed. Autodesk Research is addressing this by pioneering an innovative product design process that integrates sensor-collected product performance data into the design. This approach incorporates performance data into cloud-based digital twin workflows and automates the product design iteration process. It addresses the paradox of designing products for users without integrating users’ operational data. The focus is on incorporating sensor data into product design iterations, setting the stage for a performance-aided design approach.

Autodesk Research designed and manufactured a flying vehicle to validate this performance-aided design solution. Leveraging the advanced manufacturing capabilities at the Autodesk Technology Centers, such as metal additive manufacturing, CNC machining, and advanced composite fabrication, each component was designed using a bottom-up approach. Its primary purpose is to serve as a modular test bed for innovative performance-aided design technology. The modularity of its components allows for quick changes to the vehicle's configuration, enabling comparative evaluation of alternative designs.