The best example of a smart material to-date is an engineering marvel given to us by nature, called muscle. Such magical processes would create structures whose internal and external shapes are not permanently determined at their time of fabrication, but are subject to a range of movement and reconfiguration. Incorporating intelligence in machines Figure 4. Control aspects of automated fabrication. The key elements, shown here with underlined labels, are the representation of abstract geometry in computer code and the creation of machine instructions to direct the fabrication process.
Control is the essence of automated fabrication.
It links the mind of the user with the physical processes that create the desired object. The two most important elements of control are the representation of the desired geometry in computer code and then translation of this code into instructions to guide the fabrication process. The geometry may arise from a human design, from scanning the shape of an existing object, or from another mathematical source. In the course of fabrication, a good system will monitor its ongoing results and feed them back to the control computer. After the object is made, the user may evaluate the results and decide whether to make certain changes to the design or to the process parameters.