That number also includes CATIA from Dassault and Inventor and AutoCAD and all the other stuff from AutoDesk. Solidworks and F360 themselves are likely less than 20% of the overall market.
f360 and Solidworks are common in the maker communities/youtube/etc as they both offer free/cheap licenses to get started, so that's what you're mostly likely to encounter unless you actually work in the field.
When people think CAD, they think "making a 3D model of a teapot".
Whereas most of the dollars in that pie chart are spent on super specialist software that does things like modelling the electron flow through a 3 nanometer transistor... Or modelling people flows in an evacuation of a tunnel...
That data is the market reality. Nobody in business cares about 3d models of teapots, they're trying to build physical products and there's a lot more that goes into that process than the mechanical drawing of the end product.
There are some users who need to do things like electron flow, but the overwhelming use case is in fact product engineering and development. The other 80% of the people not using Solidworks are not doing anything weird, they just aren't using Solidworks for whatever reason.
When mechanical engineering teams think "CAD", they aren't thinking "CAD", but rather Product Lifecycle Management ("PLM"). The drawing tool is one part of a much larger system. Think the difference between Quickbooks and SAP.
Siemens NX is the big entry in this market. You don't hear about it because 3D printer users aren't making YouTubes about it, and because you probably don't work in the field.
This project is out of universities which in my experience usually have Solidworks licenses, plus some students using F360 because they were already using it before joining the university. I went to one of the author's universities (Tohoku) and indeed Solidworks was generally used there.
The animations look too good to me to come from such software though. Maybe they used blender.
I saw this last year, really cool demo. Stronger materials are needed to make this useful and that looks like a nightmare to manufacture at scale. Also mechanical advantage seems to be a major tradeoff.
There is a reason biology tugs on ropes and lets reaction surfaces slide around instead.
> There is a reason biology tugs on ropes and lets reaction surfaces slide around instead.
And that reason is that it's very difficult to have a rolling joint or muscle because you can't get blood into it. It's largely fundamentally inaccessible to an organism that must grow itself. There are massive advantages that are unexplored by evolution.
Even further, gears are inherently asymmetric, meaning they are even harder to evolve. Nevertheless nature DOES use gears[1] when it can.
> You can shape the surfaces the way you want for the movement you need.
> Also mechanical advantage seems to be a major tradeoff. There is a reason biology tugs on ropes and lets reaction surfaces slide around instead.
I'm not sure I understand. Do you think that there's a biological benefit to ropes and sliding (compared to this)? Or is it simply that ropes/sliding are easier to evolve? You probably know this, but (in case others are unaware) there are rotary "engines" in biology (e.g., bacterial flagellum and F0F1 ATPase), but, obviously, they are not quite like this spherical gear.
Imagine two sliding surfaces held agains each other and pulled by ropes.
You can shape the surfaces the way you want for the movement you need. Make them as big or small depending on how much compressive load you need to transfer. You can place as many ropes, controlled ropes or just stretch ropes to have as much flexibily, control and ability to survive tension as you need.
You can do all of this with pretty crappy materials and high tolerances.
When compared to that, gears that transfer all of the load through individual small teeth that must be made from incredible materials and struggle if you need multiple degrees of freedom there's really no competition.
Unless you need to deal with fast spinning things or simple 1dof fixed axis rotations gears are terrible technology and they rarely ever evolved not because they are hard but because they have huge weeknesses and barely any advantages.
The only gears that ever evolved that I know of are used for syncing movement.
Also, "ropes" have the benefit of driving wide ranges of rotation while requiring relatively small muscle contraction distance, by attaching close to a joint's pivot point, which meshes well with muscle fiber physical characteristics and limits.
E.g. a 135° forearm range driven by a 4-5cm tri/bicep contraction
Example of 1D gear used in planthopper used for syncing the movement of the legs [1]. Even there the gears are only used for young planthoppers, and adults use another syncing mechanism after their skin molts away.
its actually like a hydraulic cushion , with a self renewable matrix between the bones. we are close to mimicking tissue renewal with some of the recent materials advances.
The paper mentions that the rough surface of sintered powdered metal 3D printing won’t work (presumably way to much sliding friction). It also suggests the possibility of using that printing technique and surface machining it after printing.
By far the easiest way to deal with this would be to just print them slightly oversized, add some abrasive paste, and then 'run in' a set using some balanced pattern of movement, tightening the clearance as the parts wear in until they're sufficiently smooth.
> the main disadvantage of Abe et al.’s design is that it is an over-actuated mechanism: it requires four instead of only three actuators. In this paper, we propose a variation on this mechanism which requires three actuators, thus simplifying its control and its potential cost.
That’s sort of the problem. Four motors and nine gears, versus three motors and six gears. I suspect their solution here may be as simple as having two rolling motors at angles, and only one motor for twisting.
I once designed a mirror array to track the sun and reflect the image on a solar panel to get more concentrated power (solars cells = expensive, mirrors = cheap). Obviously there are all kinds of limits to that but the interesting part in the current context was the drive: it started off with two motors per mirror and in successive iterations that went to one motor per row of mirrors and one motor per column to one for all the rows and one for all the columns and finally a single motor for all of the mirrors. It was mostly my lack of understanding about the way the sun and the earth interact over time at the beginning of the project that caused me to choose the most naive solution, but as understanding increased I saw more and more ways to optimize the whole thing ending up with a set of gears that resemble the relationship between the two bodies pretty much in the same way that a planetarium would do, with the angles of the mirrors as the function of the time of day and the position of the earth in its orbit around the sun as well as the axis of tilt.
That whole process took about a year and it looks to me as though this project is on a similar path of optimization, though it likely won't go much further than 3 motors, 4 gears assuming they can find a way to put the twist motor inside the spherical gear, which would come with its own challenges (supplying power, feedback).
That's very clever. I've seen videos of this before. It's a robotic actuator.
Notice that it's overconstrained. The ball has 3 degrees of freedom, but is driven by 4 motors, which must maintain some invariant relationship. It's kind of like a mechanical implementation of a quaternion.
Good point. I wonder how they manage the inevitable mis-match of the motor positions? Seems like it would be easy to get the system into a high-tension state, with motors fighting each other.
Even moreso as the "pitch" of each monopole gear is controlled by a worm gear. So I think if you don't implement the controller very carefully, you could get situations where both worm gears work against each other.
Very cool design (and analysis, and animation) -- this is one case where I'm glad the authors paid up to make the paper available to the public. (And equally annoyed that they had to.)
I will say that I don't really get the problem being solved here, though. There are any number of ways to do this if you don't need to rotate the output arm around its own axis. If you do, simply adding another motor to the output arm seems like the most straightforward way to solve the problem, and with fewer compromises elsewhere. Can any robotics gurus comment on the relative advantages of the all-in-one approach using a single spherical gear?
Honorable mention: Not a gear, however 4(!) DoF with a locking mechanism (the spherical bushing expands both inward and outward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qnYgE-qNHU
I buy everything up to the point where they present a second prototype with the motors opposite to each other, i.e. right in the gimbal lock position you'd usually be careful to avoid. (3:55 in the video)
I thought the same thing at around 1:17 in the video; if they stopped the pitch axis movement 90 degrees earlier (so that the poles were aligned), it wouldn't be able to do the roll axis movement because it'd be in a gimbal lock position, right?
This solution seems to have a lot of “gimbal lock” positions so I’m not sure 3 degrees is really accurate. The gears are so large that you lose 120° of rotation along one axis. 2.6 DoF is probably more accurate.
Not sure - the controllers have 4 degrees of freedom, so maybe they managed to arrange only to lose at most one at any given time, so that they always have three?
I’ve been noodling on this while doing shores today. I think the main thing is not degrees of freedom here, but degrees of freedom around a fixed point. There are four servos in this thing, and about nine gears. You can rotate a probe through a full three degrees of freedom with three servos and six gears, but you also need the X Y and Z coordinates if you want to spin an object without moving it.
I think one more motor would give you full 3 degrees of freedom by allowing you to move the braces out of the path of movement. But I also suspect that one more of these motor assemblies would get you close to five degrees, and four of them total would get you six, with some wiring troubles to deal with. In the end you’d have an arm with just a “shoulder” and a wrist, which could be pretty interesting.
I aLso wonder if you could invert the gear and the cog, with motors inside the sphere.
The six degrees I’m aware of are translation through three dimensions and rotation along each axis. Assembling a car takes a lot of those for some fiddly bits for the interior and under the car.
Some configurations of this device can rotate 180° on one and about 240° on another. One configuration, the one that gets the most screen time, is worse than that, which is what got me wondering in the first place.
Can't see teh video but I think I've seen this before - very neat but there seems to be a couple of conditions where a kind of lock up (gimbal lock?) could occur.
Edited. Thought the name in the linked article ("ABENICS") was a reference to the former PM (yikes), but instead it is probably a reference to the author of the article himself.
Still weird to call a technology by one own's name... usually we let other people do it for us. Especially in Japan, where humbleness is valued. Thus I am still a bit suspicious.
I would still welcome an alternative name, more descriptive.
Edit: "spherical gear" is the name used elsewhere, and it fits nicely!
Doesn't make sense if the Abe person is part of the group who developped it (at least, according to the way Japanese people think of groups of persons). Unless he's dead.
I could see this being used for a 5 axis fdm printer to replace a traditional 2 axis gimbal. I’m not sure where the value would be except for highly specialized applications where you are ok with fdm, but want to avoid traditional layer building (think making a sphere ‘smooth’)
> Old-school, driven by craft, not obsessed about clicks and profit.
While this has been the prevailing sentiment for Germany, I wouldn't be so sure after the Volkswagen emission fiasco. At least Volkswagen seems pretty eager to work around QA laws...
"""The U.S. remains the world's R&D factory, but when it comes to building, we're plainly going backwards."""
"""For many decades, the American government has focused overwhelmingly on discovery rather than deployment."""
"""And then, around 1980, we basically stopped building,” Jesse Jenkins, who researches energy policy at Princeton, told me. In the past 40 years, he said, the U.S. has applied several different brakes to our capacity to build what’s already been invented. Under Ronald Reagan, the legacy of successful public-private partnerships was ignored in favor of the simplistic diagnosis that the government was to blame for every major problem. In the ’70s, liberals encouraged the government to pass new environmental regulations to halt pollution and prevent builders from running roughshod over low-income neighborhoods. And then middle-class Americans used these new rules to slow down the construction of new housing, clean-energy projects—just about everything. These reactions were partly understandable; for example, air and water pollution in the ’70s were deadly crises. But “when you combine these big shifts, you basically stop building anything,” Jenkins said."""
Note: If you skim the above article, be aware that "Bush" refers to Vannevar Bush (not George #41 or George #43) in several places.
Japan and Germany have also demonstrated terrifying war-making capability and willingness not so long ago. This is consistent with part of your comment ("old-school, driven by craft") but problematic w.r.t. "utility to society and civilization", given the goals of authoritarian regimes, under both a secular demagogue and a supreme divine ruler. The U.S., through IBM, sold Nazi Germany tabulating machines, which made atrocities more "efficient".
My point is not to assign blame or simply comment on geopolitics. Rather, I just want to raise awareness that technology and craft exist in a broader context, easily misappropriated and distorted.
I hope the technologists of today (us) are the leaders of the future. We should not abdicate key decisions about technology to others. We must get involved with investment, ethics, safety, and regulatory decisions.
>> Just looking through the paper makes my head spin. The Japanese are undoubtedly the most skilled engineers in the world.
> May I have your permission to use this as an example of a logical fallacy?
_If_ the comment was "Just looking through the paper makes my head spin; therefore, the Japanese are undoubtedly the most skilled engineers in the world." then it would be a logical fallacy.
As written, one has to make an _uncharitable_ assumption in order to classify it as a fallacy.
A _charitable_ reading is that the author has other experience suggesting the ascendancy of Japanese engineers. Such a mindset would open the door to interesting conversation, such as "What else have you seen that impresses you about Japanese engineering?" That might lead to everyone learning more, and, heck, even being inspired. Try this next time, please?
