LatticeRobot
During the short journey from industry event to hotel, Matt Shomper and Blake Courter thrash out the dynamics of two business entities, both of which are incorporated six weeks later.
Rolling through the city in a Tesla, there is perhaps no more suitable location for the two of them to discuss the future of product design. Between them and their businesses, they’re going to have a stab at advancing the additive manufacturing industry’s capacity to innovate.
“It needs to be a Disney experience,” Shomper said then and has said again since. “Seamless and magical.”
‘It’ is LatticeRobot, an online community for lattice research and knowledge sharing. The platform will invite industrial engineers, artists, and hobbyists to contribute to, and experiment within, a ‘sandbox’ for lattice development and discoverability. By exploring a combination of base materials and lattice geometries, the founding members of LatticeRobot hope engineers can create data-driven results.
Shomper, the CEO of the venture, has co-founded the company with CTO Nachiket Patil, while Courter is the Chair of the company. Courter comes into the picture through the second of those businesses discussed in the car – Gradient Control Laboratories, an incubator for advanced engineering software companies. The first in its portfolio is LatticeRobot, with Shomper and Courter spurring each other on to launch the respective businesses earlier this year.
“In order for it to purchase shares, Gradient Control needs to be an official entity. It needs to be a thing,” Shomper quotes Courter as saying.
It is now a thing, and as of this week, LatticeRobot is too. At Develop3D Live on September 20, LatticeRobot is to announce its public beta launch, debuting the public-facing site with ‘unit cells that we’ve computed with our technology stack.’
Through this beta launch, LatticeRobot is looking to retrieve feedback from as wide an array of people as possible. The seamless and magical experience that Shomper is chasing is so they can open the doors to everyone, but also use their insights to better the platform.
“We want to engage with everyone from the hardcore engineers to the hobbyists, artists, people that would use lattices in an aesthetic manner because that also increases the user base,” Shomper tells TCT. “If we just go to the hardcore guys using additive in industry, then that’s like 1% of 1% engineers. It’s a tiny, tiny fraction.”
Shomper is of a mindset that when it comes to the science of lattices then each of these groups can learn from each other and with each other to become more skilled and knowledgeable. Having worked with 3D printing technology for ten years, mostly in the healthcare sector through Tangible Solutions, Shomper has become somewhat of an expert when it comes to 3D printable lattice structures. He would not only utilise his nTop subscription during his work hours, but often during his leisure time such was his enjoyment in creating and using new structures. Shomper would then have no qualms about sharing screenshots of his designs on LinkedIn and transferring his design blocks via direct message when the inevitable request came.
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Nobody knows why they use a diamond strip lattice versus a gyroid TPMS. The subset of people that know is very, very little.
Through LatticeRobot, he is now looking to supplement the likes of nTop with a platform that encourages more of this kind of exploration and sharing.
“There’s been an explosion of design tools that allow engineers to create and play with pretty crazy geometry,” Shomper says. “It used to be that the geometry tools were very limited if you wanted to create something artistic or something that you can lattice. 3D printing came out, processes became more refined, and then the ability to print far surpassed the ability to model. Now, the modelling tools – like nTop, 3DXpert, things that fill parts with lattices – they’ve caught up and they’re providing advanced geometry capabilities.
“The downside is something between when you start to be able to make cool geometry and when these tools came out, there became this advent of, ‘Hey, look at that cool thing I can fill a part with.’ But very rarely do people understand why they fill a part with something. There are all these generative design tools that have started to come out, and they’ve taken the engineering analysis and the choice away and said, ‘Well, we’ll just fill it with the thing that meets your requirements.’ Nobody knows why they use a diamond strip lattice versus a gyroid TPMS. The subset of people that know is very, very little.”
Shomper wishes to change that because he believes the base structure of a geometry is often the difference between ‘a cutting-edge product and something that’s just existing in this space because it looks cool.’ His method of making that change is what he describes as a ‘Wikipedia-like tool’ where users can browse, compare and contrast in a data-centric and interactive way. The vision is to provide a whitespace whereby users can drag and drop lattices of interest for free, before doing a deep-dive comparison between each of the selected lattices.
LatticeRobot, then, is about democratisation of knowledge. Shomper has built up extensive knowledge in lattice structures over the years and is currently making a living providing consultancy on the very subject, but LatticeRobot will allow him – as just one example – to open-source his expertise.
“Through the course of my career, mostly using nTop, I’ve built up a fairly unique database of my own unit cells, my own lattices, and the downside as a consultant is if I offer those up to a customer, it inherently becomes their intellectual property. Usually, the consultant agreement says, ‘whatever I work on for you, it’s yours,’” Shomper explains, before clarifying: “I’ve got no interest in intellectual property. Call me stupid, I probably could make a lot of money out of it, but I want to be the inspiration for people who are building products, call me more of an artistic engineer. Spit something out, here’s the idea, you take it and run with it and figure out what you want to do with it. That’s what I get excited about.”
While Shomper personally doesn’t care about IP, that’s not to say the LatticeRobot platform doesn’t. All data that gets uploaded to LatticeRobot will be shareable, but Shomper says the ‘IP landscape’ still needs to be ‘figured out’. He supposes that some users might need to grant access to unit cells if the person who uploaded it wanted to protect their IP. There might also be a need, on occasion, to lean on LatticeRobot’s software partners – so far nTop, Solo Lattices and Cognitive Design Systems have all been announced – to tackle complex parts or should the user prefer to outsource the design of a product.
As Shomper and his team see it, LatticeRobot has not been established to compete with nTop et al – “It’s not to fill parts with lattices and it’s not to produce a final validated solution” – but instead to complement them. And though Hyperganic and BASF have released a latticing database, and EOS has its digital foam library, he still expects LatticeRobot to stand apart.
“The downside to a lot of these tools,” Shomper says, “is that they’re still using the same 30 lattices. They’re all strut-based lattices – maybe they sprinkle in one of five TPMS – they really don’t want to explore, and they’re also not a host to more information other than just ‘here’s the lattice, here’s the data.’ LatticeRobot will have a user community that contributes, similar to Wikipedia, so if you go to a BCC unit cell, you’re going to get: ‘Here’s the applications for where it gets used, here’s research papers that have studied the BCC unit cell.’ We’re going to scrape data and link to data, so it’s a one-stop shop.
“If you search for BCC units on the internet now, you get a Wikipedia page which is fairly vague, and then 100 research papers that are all disparate, disconnected, and even a smart engineer is not going to be able to glean all that data. So, the goal is to be able to just have that data in one spot.”
The emergence of LatticeRobot comes at a pivotal point, Shomper believes. As 3D printing processes get more refined, and they find their way into more manufacturing facilities, it makes sense that those tasked with using the technology ought to be more educated. If there’s a bracket that can be optimised to save on material, weight, and cost, then those faced with that prospect should be able to quickly determine which lattice to use – and they should have ample choice before making that decision.
“I see it as broader access to innovation; when you have a community that just better understands why you use [lattices].”
This democratisation of knowledge flies in the face of a belief Shomper had when he worked in private industry: that democratisation stifles innovation. Back then, he understood why someone with intellectual property would question what benefit it had to them to share their proprietary processes and workflows.
“We’re now directly challenging that and saying, ‘it’s best to share data as a community,” Shomper says. “We’ve already seen [some] resistance, ‘I’m not giving you my data, you’re going to have to pay for it.’ It’ll be an interesting landscape to navigate, who aligns with the vision? We’re asking the question, is this mutually beneficial if people know what the heck they’re doing? And then they use their software with these special types of lattices. Are you willing to help us share and grow this idea?”
Already, Shomper has seen some buy-in on socials, and the three publicly announced software partners may soon be bolstered by a couple more big names. As the beta commences, he will soon find out how much appetite there is for the kind of knowledge-sharing and exploration many believe to be necessary.
We do not intend to charge users for the experience of LatticeRobot.
Last week, a LatticeRobot GLSL Interop beta went live for prospective users to take a peek at the code it can output and again provide feedback – that will be a cornerstone of this platform. What Shomper is also conscious of is transparency. When it comes to open platforms that encourage, and to a point rely on, collaboration, questions will be asked about the business model. How do Shomper and his team hope to make money from this platform?
Well, currently at least, those involved are picking up a wage from elsewhere, mostly through ongoing consultancy work, but discussions have been had between them about how they fund the project.
“I don’t mind saying this publicly, we do not intend to charge users for the experience of LatticeRobot,” Shomper says. “Will we potentially come out with advanced premium features that we may have a subscription for, I’m not saying no. There’s a lot of stuff we could do once we have this crazy amount of data that I think would be incredibly valuable.”
Already, discussions have taken place with potential angel investors, and Shomper has floated the idea that software partners could be charged for access to the data to harness what they find on the platform to enhance their products. Shomper, personally, believes big in the community angle of the platform, even quipping that ‘the world doesn’t need more software as a service.’
“We’re going to democratise access to a database,” Shomper says. “I think I would be a really dumb CEO if I immediately followed that up in a year by saying, ‘Hey, haha, guys, five bucks a month.’ My message will be, 'Do not charge users for access.' We’ll figure out a different way to make money if making money actually matters to the business. But the business may not need to make money to be a valuable tool in the community.”
There is still a lot to be decided, but Shomper is steadfast in his belief that more focus needs to be applied to this core competency. He also thinks there might be scope to apply the collaborative sandbox concept to other potential pain points – CompositeRobot, for example. But, for someone who has made a name for himself on social media as an expert in lattice structures, there was no better place to start.
“I love lattices so much I started a company about it. That’s at the core of it.”
Matt Shomper will officially launch the public beta of LatticeRobot at Develop3D Live on the Main Stage at 11.20am, September 20. He will also take part in a panel session focused on computational design on the 'Computational Design and Future Fabrication' stream at 2.20pm.
