Improving designers’ ability to identify manufacturing constraints during design can help reduce the time and cost involved in the development of new products. Different design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) tools exist, but the design outcomes produced using such tools are often evaluated without comparison to existing tools. This study addresses the research gap by directly comparing design performance using two design support tools: a worksheet listing DfAM principles and a manufacturability analysis software tool that analyzes compliance with the same principles. In a randomized-controlled study, 49 nonexpert designers completed a design task to improve the manufacturability of a 3D-printed part using either the software tool or the worksheet tool. In this study, design outcome data (creativity and manufacturability) and design process data (task load and time taken) were measured. We identified statistically significant differences in the number of manufacturability violations in the software and worksheet groups and the creativity of the designs with novel build orientations. Results demonstrated limitations associated with lists of principles and highlighted the potential of software in promoting creativity by encouraging the exploration of alternative build orientations. This study provides support for using software to help designers, particularly nonexpert designers who rely on trial and error during design, evaluate the manufacturability of their designs more effectively, thereby promoting concurrent engineering design practices.

Detecting and recognizing objects is one of the most important uses of vision systems in nature and is consequently highly evolved. This paper aims to accurately detect an object using its shape and color information from a complex background. In particular, we evaluated our algorithm to detect 19 different integrated circuits (IC) from 10 different printed circuit boards (PCB) of different colors. We have compared three different shape descriptors for four different color space models. We have evaluated shape detection algorithms in different lighting conditions (indoor, outdoor, and controlled light source) to find suitable illumination for image acquisition. We undertook statistical hypothesis testing to find the effect of color space models and shape descriptors on the accuracy, false positive and false negative rates. While measuring accuracy, we have noted that L*a*b* color space is significantly worse, and the best result is obtained in YCbCr color space using bounding box shape descriptors for 2500 Lux using LED.