Loading...
Help others discover this article by sharing it
Check out more articles from the artificial intelligence category
DeepSeek is set to release a new AI model focused on coding in February, aiming to enhance developer...
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is the go-to method for designing most of today’s physical products. Engineers use CAD to turn 2D sketches into 3D models that they can then test and refine before sending a final version to a production line. But the software is notoriously complicated to learn, with thousands of commands to choose from. To be truly proficient in the software takes a huge amount of time and practice.
MIT engineers are looking to ease CAD’s learning curve with an AI model that uses CAD software much like a human would. Given a 2D sketch of an object, the model quickly creates a 3D version by clicking buttons and file options, similar to how an engineer would use the software.
The MIT team has created a new dataset called VideoCAD, which contains more than 41,000 examples of how 3D models are built in CAD software. By learning from these videos, which illustrate how different shapes and objects are constructed step-by-step, the new AI system can now operate CAD software much like a human user.
With VideoCAD, the team is building toward an AI-enabled “CAD co-pilot.” They envision that such a tool could not only create 3D versions of a design, but also work with a human user to suggest next steps, or automatically carry out build sequences that would otherwise be tedious and time-consuming to manually click through.
“There’s an opportunity for AI to increase engineers’ productivity as well as make CAD more accessible to more people,” says Ghadi Nehme, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
“This is significant because it lowers the barrier to entry for design, helping people without years of CAD training to create 3D models more easily and tap into their creativity,” adds Faez Ahmed, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
Ahmed and Nehme, along with graduate student Brandon Man and postdoc Ferdous Alam, will present their work at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in December.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says on-device AI represents the biggest threat to traditional data...
OpenAI is reportedly preparing powerful audio AI upgrades for its first ChatGPT hardware, promising...
