Computer-Aided Engineering of Plywood Upholstered Furniture Frames

Abstract

Until the early 1900s, furniture was built by hand, one piece at a time. The industrial revolution and modern manufacturing technology has changed all of that. Today, as the furniture industry moves firmly into the next century, computerized systems and automated manufacturing have become more common to the industry. This thesis represents an effort to analyze the current practices in computer-aided design of upholstered furniture, specifically plywood frame furniture, and to develop new procedures for reducing the lead-time in upholstery product development. Different 3-D modeling techniques for designing plywood furniture frames and their features have been developed and implemented. A plywood frame feature library has been created, and geometric relations needed to fully constrain each feature type have been developed. This reduces modeling time and also increases consistency in the solid models. A new reverse engineering procedure, using an articulating arm, has been proposed, implemented, and tested for 3-D digitization of plywood frames. The proposed methodology eliminates some of the traditional processes currently followed in the industry, thus making the product development faster and more streamlined. Further, an algorithm has been developed, implemented and tested for automatically mirroring plywood upholstery frame assemblies in a CAD system. The algorithm considerably reduces the modeling lead-time in the product development process. Finally, some future work that considers currently available 3-D CAD technologies has been recommended which would help close the gap between upholstery designers and manufacturers.