High Resolution Representation and Simulation of Braiding Patterns

From the hand-crafted to the highly engineered, braided structures have demonstrated broad versatility across scales, materials, and performance types, leading to their use in a plethora of application domains. Despite this prevalence, braided structures have seen little exploration within a contemporary architectural context. Within the flora robotica project, complex braided structures are a core element of the architectural vision, driving a need for generalized braid design modeling tools that can support fabrication. Due to limited availability of existing suitable tools, this interest motivates the development of a digital toolset for design exploration. In this paper, we present our underlying methods of braid topology representation and physics-based simulation for hollow tubular braids. We contextualize our approach in the literature where existing methods for this class of problem are not directly suited to our application, but offer important foundations. Generally, the tile generation method we employ is an already known approach, but we meaningfully extend it to increase the flexibility and scope of topologies able to be modeled. Our methods support design workflows with both predetermined target geometries and generative, adaptive inputs. This provides a high degree of design agency by supporting real-time exploration and modification of topologies. We address some common physical simulation problems, mainly the overshooting problem and collision detection optimization, for which we develop dynamic simulation constraints. This enables unrolling into realistically straight strips, our key fabrication-oriented contribution. We conclude by outlining further work, specifically the design and realization of physical braids, fabricated robotically or by hand.