Making the Best 5-Axis Technology Available to Everyone

BEN WEBER: Hi, everyone. And welcome to the industry talk today. My name is Ben Weber. I work at ModuleWorks. I'm the head of Strategic Partnerships for one of our business areas, CAM Automation. I'm responsible for the strategic cooperation between Autodesk and ModuleWorks in the area of CAM tool toolpaths in manufacturing. So I make sure that the Fusion 360 product management team's long-term requirements are understood by our team, ultimately with the goal to make sure that the combination of technology of ModuleWorks and Autodesk is reaching the end users at a timely manner.

I'll go straight to the agenda. So today I'm going to introduce ModuleWorks as an organization, just in case you don't know who we are. And I'll talk about digital transformation and how ModuleWorks plays a role in that. I'll then go on to the central part of my presentation, which is about 5-axis. It's about 5-axis machining. And I'll be taking you on a journey through the 5-axis time machine. Excuse the DeLorean there.

After that, I'll be talking about the Autodesk and ModuleWorks partnership, and the section which I'm calling fusing together the best of the best. And lastly, I'll touch on the portfolio of toolpath technology, which will be reaching Fusion 360.

So ModuleWorks, to give you an idea of our organization, I'll tell you a few key facts and figures. ModuleWorks has 1,500 person years of software development by the end of 2022. That means all the technology we developed, that's how long it's taken to develop it. There are around a half a million end users in the world using technology based on ModuleWorks. That's more than 200 customers, which are integrating our technology.

As an organization, we're growing steadily with a 20% average annual growth rate. And in the CAM market we have a market share of more than 75%. We have a total team of more than 250, and of that we have more than 175 staff in the development of our technology.

So as an organization, we don't just supply the CAM market or the CAD/CAM market. We have different technological areas. There are a lot of synergies in the different areas. And I'll give you a brief overview on the different technology markets we have. So I mentioned CAD/CAM, where we're supplying 75% of the vendors. We also work with CNC control makers, such as FANUC, Siemens, Mitsubishi. So we're working with three of the four largest CNC control makers providing simulation technology, which runs on the control.

We're also in the additive manufacturing area. That's a quickly growing market with 15% compound annual growth rate, and we're providing core technologies for the various additive processes. Digital dentistry, we're a leading supplier, supplying 35% of the vendors.

And we move on to the industrial side again, robotics. We have a vast range of complex toolpath planning processes for offline programming for robotics. And lastly, I mentioned machine tool builders. We're reaching 60% of CNC machine to builders, either via a direct partnership, or via supplier partnerships.

So that's who we are and which markets we're working with. I'll go on to talk about digital manufacturing. Digital manufacturing is the world we live in. It is transforming into a fully digital world. But what's the current state?

Well, it's no surprise that we see new technologies-- automated manufacturing, robotics, additive manufacturing, and cloud-based solutions. A lot of these topics are actually covered by the portfolio of Autodesk products. But these technologies are reaching us, and there is requirements based on these. But there's also a demand for shorter product life-cycles and flexible supply chains.

So the last several years have shown that you don't really know what's going to happen in the next weeks, alone the next month of the year. So much has changed and so much has had to be shifted because of the global, political, demographic changes. Now this means that there's been a requirement for the best-in-class solution, but also a fast time to market. And that is our slogan as an organization. ModuleWorks get there faster, and that's what we're relating to.

Now on top of this, something which you may or may not be aware of, is globally there is a shortage of software developers and application engineers. So manufacturing software companies do find it challenging to find software developers who can develop their technology, and I'm talking about software vendors and also hardware vendors. And this means that overall, in achieving digital transformation, we're seeing significant challenges.

Now, how does ModuleWorks fit into that? Well, ModuleWorks enables shared technology development for digital transformation. That means that we're developing technology, a very narrow focus of core toolpaths and simulations. So we're not making a full CAM solutions, for instance. We're just making those bits which we're really good at.

And what we're doing is we're developing essentially at ModuleWorks, but licensing this to any vendors out there. So the majority of the CAM vendors are using our toolpath technology and our simulation technology.

Now, the main impacts that that has is it means that the best-in-class technology is readily available to our partners. What it also does is it frees up the resources at those CAM vendors. It means that they don't have to focus on developing all the thousands of things that we've got in our portfolio, all different parameters.

They can focus on the things which are defining their USP, the things which their end users want, and all the other things they have to do as manufacturing vendors. There is so much going on, so many challenges. And any type of resources which are freed end up bringing a significant value to the most important part of the chain, the users, the people who are using those solutions.

Now overall, we see our role in digital manufacturing reducing the risk of technological lag. There are all these challenges and we have to deliver, we, as manufacturing vendors, but also as job shops, as engineering companies, we have to deliver. We see ModuleWorks reducing the risk of lag. And that's in line with our vision statement, which is to develop the best toolpath and simulation technology and make it accessible, affordable, and useful.

So I hope that gave a bit of an introduction as to who we are. Now, the title of this presentation includes the word 5-axis. And I thought in order to give you a full picture of who ModuleWorks is and what we're doing, but also what the partnership with Autodesk is, I thought it makes sense to give you an introduction into the 5-axis time machine.

Imagine this. The year is 1999. And only 10% of CAM companies have a 5-axis CAM solution. 5-axis CAM was extremely expensive. And the CNC machine tool builders wanted and needed to sell more CNC machines. I'm not going to question that, because why shouldn't they bring more value to the market?

Now, when we're talking about 5-axis in 1999, you needed genius CAM programmers to fight the CNC process of cutting advanced 5-axis paths. And there's our genius. Did somebody asks for a CAM genius? Well, there he is.

And the first fight was surface geometries. Surface geometries had to be aligned in u, v lines and geometry creation had to make it work. Surface modeling to the rescue. And they had to construct revolved surfaces, or tabulated, and rule surfaces. And all that just to create a toolpath.

Let's fast forward to 2003. To me, that's a very lucky year. That's when ModuleWorks was founded. Now ModuleWorks 5-axis was the only system which didn't require special surface creation. And its engine was able to generate toolpath patterns from any number of surfaces. What does that mean?

Well, it meant that there could be a bigger number of complex paths programmed compared to the old solutions which had their limitations. On top of that, scales of economies meant that the entry price into 5-axis CAM became lower, because ModuleWorks started gaining more customers. It was developing centrally. It's giving accessibility. And essentially the cost of that development of the ModuleWorks engine was shared amongst all the different partners who are licensing it.

So what happened next? Well, the learning curve for 5-axis was very steep. It was a magnitude steeper than 2D or 3-axis. And that was a big challenge, because it's great having 5-axis engines which can cope with a diverse set of parts but if the training curve is so steep, how do you actually get that reach into the market? Well, what did ModuleWorks do? ModuleWorks continued developing.

So the next year after ModuleWorks, well, we developed the collision checker. A year later, we created more safety with the machine simulation, the kinematic machine simulation, which complements the 5-axis toolpaths.

Then in 2008, we focused on reducing the cycle time, so high performance roughing cycles, multi-axis roughing, for instance. But then you also have to make the software more reachable, more usable. So we develop dedicated toolpaths for specific parts, for instance, for impellers, for rotary parts, or even for engine part machining, all very different types of parts, all very complex parts which could otherwise be programmed using our 5-axis engine. On the other hand, why not create subsets of functionality which make programming those parts easier, more intuitive, and reduces the time for skilled CAM programmers?

Now if we fast forward to 2015, also the year I started at ModuleWorks, we focused on ease of use. That's a big campaign I remember in 2015. 5-axis should not just be about cutting impellers, or being able to cut impellers, and engine parts, et cetera. It should also be about having 5-axis' technology which can utilize the full potential of your CNC machine, your 5-axis CNC machine. But actually, having [? NT ?] programmers who can program it, who can use it. So ease of use was a key word.

And we even took that further. So instead of just doing the micro automation to make 5-axis easier to program, we also started thinking about replacing manual work. We thought, OK, well in Europe there was a big topic about deburring or edge breaking which we speak of in the Autodesk Fusion 360 terminology. We're talking about manual work which had to be done by a person after the machining. And we worked on replacing that fully with an automated sequence, which you can just do at the end of the CAM program.

Now, the journey continued, and this presentation is a bit too short I think to list I guess another 60 more products. And of these products, there is a multitude more of subsets. But I hope that journey gave you a bit of an idea as to how quickly we developed the 5-axis functionality to the point that it's reachable, and accessible, and usable.

So what impact did ModuleWorks have? I said accessible already. Because any CAM vendor which one in 5-axis could reach out to ModuleWorks, become a partner, integrate it, and release. And very often this could be done within six months. So the reaction time was significant.

It meant that every day [? NT ?] programmers, all of a sudden they were considering buying 5-axis, or job shops were considering buying 5-axis solutions. And of course, it was affordable, because the cost of that development was shared amongst all the different CAM vendors which are licensing ModuleWorks. ModuleWorks grew in a very good place. Every year we had more software developers, we were developing more technology, and we also gained more partners who were licensing our technology.

And lastly, through the innovation of toolpath development, and also through innovations developing further and having this vision to make our technology accessible, we had to make it more usable. This is where we invested significant assets into easy-to-use, productive, robust toolpath technology. So I'm talking about accessibility being affordable, usable. Does that ring a bell?

Well, Fusion 360 is a solution whose aim is fusing together people, processes, making designing manufacturing software accessible. It's also very affordable. And this is it. There's a lot of parallels between how a ModuleWorks as an organization developed and evolved over time, essentially to make 5-axis toolpaths reachable to everyday CAM users.

And Autodesk, who with a solution like Fusion 360, has managed to create a design and manufacturing solution which is also accessible, which can solve the everyday problems which any CAM user might have. So this story-line is going to be continued a bit later in this presentation.

Now, I'd like to talk about the partnership. I'm sure you're very eager to learn about what's going to happen in the coming years. Well, the aim here isn't necessarily to go into details as to what's being released when. It's more to talk about why we're working together, what we're working on, and roughly what's coming. And I have the support of the Autodesk product management team, the Fusion 360 product management team, who can go a little bit more detail if there's any questions on these. But let's get started.

Fusing together the best of the best. I'll start with some statistics. They never really harm. There's an organization called CimData. CimData is the leading authority on research for the CAD, CAM and PLM areas. And CimData data in the 2022 report listed the top three largest CAM development teams worldwide. So we're talking about CAM product development. These are people working in organizations who are essentially developing CAM software.

And in the top three you see Autodesk, Hexagon, and ModuleWorks. Of course, there's a slight difference to ModuleWorks as an organization, because we're only developing toolpaths and simulation components. We're not developing a full CAD/CAM solution like the others on this list are doing.

But the numbers, 250, 250 staff at Autodesk just developing the CAM products. Now Autodesk and ModuleWorks combined have by far the largest the CAM development team worldwide of 420 people, 420 people who are actually doing product development for CAM. And these people are doing this to help you. They're doing this to help end users get the best technologies they need in order for their businesses to function, in order for their CAM programmers to get good results.

Now, in order for this to be a perfect synergy, there has to be a distinct way as to how Autodesk and ModuleWorks works. Now ModuleWorks does indeed work with the majority of CAM vendors. But every single partnership is based on concrete requirements of the organization, their solution. There are so many different variables in that that one partnership typically can't be compared with another one.

So in order for there to be perfect synergy, Autodesk needs to know precisely what it wants, exactly to the point [INAUDIBLE]. Now, this is also a new partnership. So Autodesk essentially reviewed every single functionality module that it has to offer. And Autodesk itself has a significant amount of technology in CAM. Now if Autodesk defines precisely what they need, well, ModuleWorks need to know how to deliver it.

I'm going to go into Fusion 360 Milling These next slides, the content of these, are actually from Craig Chester, who is the product manager for Fusion 360 Milling. And he outlined very nicely in this spider chart the different aspects, the different core sets of functionality, that Fusion 360 has. And that's the near-term goal.

So if you look around this, you have different types of things you need as an end user of CAM. You might need drilling, 2.5D machining, turning, 3-axis, et cetera. Now this is an near-term goal, which is I believe achievable with Autodesk. But then you see there are a few areas where there could be room outwards-- speech recognition, 5-axis machining, 4-axis machining.

Now, these aspects also happen to be areas which ModuleWorks typically has been strong in ModuleWorks started in 5-axis. Of course today, ModuleWorks has a full portfolio of everything from 2-axis to 5-axis, to additive, et cetera. The 5-axis is our oldest product. It's our most established product. So that's no surprise that Autodesk are picking those areas.

Now, what happens when you fuse those together? Let's try and fill the gaps. This is what you have. So you have the technology from Fusion 360, the technology from FeatureCAM, from PowerMill, from PowerInspect, and then you add ModuleWorks. Now, I found this slide very interesting because this fits with the vision which I think vendors want. They want a comprehensive solution. And this is also Autodesk's goal with Fusion 360, to release a comprehensive solution to designing manufacturing software.

Now, I mentioned to you that ModuleWorks has nearly 100 products in various subsets and functionality. And essentially, everybody's using ModuleWorks, right? So then what differentiates different vendors? Well, it's complicated. Maybe there was a time, a long time ago, when a vendor could license just 5-axis. There was one 5-axis, a very long time ago.

But nowadays it's different, because you have such a wide portfolio of toolpaths, and it's all about integration. I'm calling this like the unicorn of perfect integration. To give you an analogy as to what integration is, imagine if you're driving a car on the highway. And you're using the radar controlled cruise control, right? And you put it on. The car is working. It knows how far the car in front is. Maybe it follows a lane. It's got senses all over the place. It doesn't matter who's manufacturing the car, whether it's a BMW, or Audi, or Volkswagen. They're using similar suppliers, right?

It'll be companies like Bosch or Continental who are doing these types of systems. Integration is getting that technology which those companies have developed, and making it work in that car you're driving. I guess some work well. I guess some don't work as well. I guess some have a lot of functionality, which other ones don't. There's a lot of variation there. But essentially, it's the same core technology. They're getting it from one supplier.

But somewhere down the line, somebody has to decide what that perfect integration is. So if you have an automated cruise control on a city car, it's going to be very different to a big SUV, because it costs different amounts. The drivers will want different types of functionality.

Now, let's go back to CAM. One big question is, how do you make a perfect user experience with all the functionality which is in Powermill, FeatureCAM, Fusion 360, PowerInspect, and ModuleWorks? If you put together, just to give you an idea, all the technology that these companies have developed, I think it's going into a few thousand person years of development, right? That's like getting one software developer and making them work and write code, develop software a few thousand years, and that's the amount we're talking about.

That's why I say it's the unicorn, right? Every integrated ModuleWorks has that perfect integration. Now, I'm being quite provocative here. But if you were to ask Craig Chester, Product Manager for Fusion 360, he would say it's achievable. And he would say, and he has said, it's all about cherry-picking all the best bits, and making a solid user experience.

That's it, user experience. So at ModuleWorks, I like talking about the core features, and the technology, and all the development we've got. And there's loads of it. Right? But what you as end users need, that's not ModuleWorks' job really. Also there at Fusion 360 they're really taking the bits which they need. And there is a certain approach, which you can see in Autodesk's approach, in Autodesk's integration.

And I'll show you what the ModuleWorks UI looks like. So this is the UI which ModuleWorks has. We use this in our own testing bed, and also a lot of vendors can choose to use this. You see that there's menu for rotary machining and different operation parameters, slicing patterns. Some of you may even be familiar with this because you might have come across solutions which use this UI.

Now, it's fine if there is just the ModuleWorks toolpaths, which is going to be used by the end user. But imagine if there's going to be different sets of toolpath functionality. This is a slide which Craig put together about consistency in look and feel. You can see that there are three different UIs on the right-hand side-- Fusion Adaptive, Fusion 4-Axis, Fusion Rotary.

And you can see, just considering what type of parameters are there and the usability, how complex it could be. But based on the feedback I've heard, people who have seen Rotary, it works. So the Autodesk Fusion 360 product managers have been working hard on understanding how what ModuleWorks is offering to complement everything else they've done, and everything else they plan on releasing.

Now, what does that mean for you? Well, what that means for you is that when you're using Fusion 360, you're getting the toolpaths which you need to machine that path. And it shouldn't really matter whether the toolpath came from Autodesk various products or ModuleWorks. So talking about this consistency, and all the technology, and how ModuleWorks and Autodesk are going to be completely complementing each other, ask the question. Well, how will all of this achieve this for Fusion 360?

Well, my observation, this is just my observation, is that Autodesk is understanding what you, the user base, need. I can validate that Autodesk has been understanding all the technology ModuleWorks has to offer. They put in significant efforts to understand all the things that ModuleWorks has been doing in the last 20 years.

And lastly, empowering its product development team. I mentioned that number 420 people working in product development at ModuleWorks and Autodesk. And that's it. To get to that goal, Autodesk will have to continue.

So I'll go into a brief overview of what's coming up in Fusion. So hopefully by now, you understand ModuleWorks, you know a bit about the partnership, and what could be coming up on a very, very general level. I'd like to at least point out some concrete features which you'll see, and also recognize in the future and use in the future.

So I mentioned rotary as an example. So 4-axis is roughing and 4-axis wall finishing will be coming up. But then you also have an automatic 3 + 2 roughing, automatic deburring, a geodesic swath, and multi-axis machining. And I'm going to cover each one of these in one slide.

Let's start with rotary. So rotary, as the name suggests, handles rotary parts. And so you see some nice parts which you probably wouldn't-- machine there on the right-hand side, which the majority of people wouldn't say. Rotary parts, that's the key point. A common machine setup would be a rotary axis with a 3-axis or a 2-axis milling head. And realistically, if you're going to use rotary, the part would be something like an extruder or a compressor screw.

Once you try out the technology, you'll see the types of parts where you see there's a huge benefit using a rotary. Now, this is filling one of the gaps which we saw earlier on Craig Chester's spider chart. That is 4-axis functionality.

Next, we have automatic deburring. I touched on this earlier. And this is one of my favorite bits of tech, because it's not very often that you can see a laborious manual process being replaced in such an elegant and easy way. And if you look at all the pieces of the puzzle, people are already machining parts on the CNC machine. And then they're taking the part off, with safety gloves I guess, in Europe, and then they're grinding or standing the edges off.

Why do that? Why don't you just take the part out of the machine that's already deburred? That's the whole concept. So it creates a highly automated toolpath to debur the edges using a spherical tool. And bearing in mind, automatic is a key part of the value here. Now we're talking about doing 5-axis edge breaking, and the programmer doesn't have to have so much knowledge of 5-axis. So there are things like automatic tilting, collision checking, and such.

And the tool is positioned in the middle, in the bi-vector. And it automatically detects the sharp edges. So you don't have to start doing loads of selection, and clicking of complex paths. It will already pick out all the edges, which is the biggest value of it. So this is a very small operation to add to the end of the CAM programming, which replaces hard work, manual hard work.

And there are other approaches to achieve deburring or edge breaking using CAM solutions. But even if you compare it to those ones, it is significantly reducing the setup time and the iterations, and all the individual things you have to program. So sticking with the theme of reducing the amount of programming and the iterations, the next one is automatic 3 + 2 axis roughing.

So if you look at this part on the right-hand side, you probably think, OK, well that's quite a lot of material to remove in the roughing operation. And you can't see the part very well. But try to figure out which direction you start with. If you wanted to machine that, in terms of programming, where would you start? You probably would start at the top. Some people might say, oh, well actually I'd start at that corner where most of the material can be removed. Right?

I mean, what you want? I mean you want stability in your machine. You want as much material removed as quickly as possible. Now, this cycle, it automatically determines and chooses the machine directions. So when you're thinking about where you would start machining, or think about all the directions you'd continue-- the first direction, the next one, subsequent ones. Each time you're doing an indexing. You're deciding.

Well, the system decides that for you. And they will continue doing this for the entire part. So it'll take over the entire roughing operation of that part. And what it does is it checks for the maximum rest machining area, and it selects the biggest part of it. So it will logically figure out where it starts, where it would have the biggest impact in removing as much material as possible on the machine. And it's got automatic tool direction.

So you can see on the drawing at the bottom, it will figure out how to access all those bits in the best way. What is does, it machines the area for automatic containments, and it'll carry on until it stops condition. So you essentially tell it roughly where you want it to stop, and it'll continue doing the directions. That takes away a lot of operations. You end up with quite a few individual operations for roughing, and then you don't have to program each one individually.

Next I'll talk about SWARF. Because SWARF, actually it stands for Side Wall Axial Relief Feed, something which I learned not that long ago. But we also call it flank milling. Now this is a 5-axis simultaneous milling process for machining fluid parts. And the goal is to produce a target surface just with one cut. So imagine you have a tool, and you want to use the whole flute length. Well, you would achieve that with one cut.

What does that mean? Well, it means there's a better surface finish quality. And also, again, you don't have to do hand finishing, so even this can reduce a manual step. And the finishing cycle time is shorter. And with SWARF you can actually access the full machining area, because you have a simultaneous 5-axis toolpath with vector orientation.

The kinematics of the machine? Well constant cutting conditions are there. So you have a higher rate of material removal, but a low cutting force.

Next, multi axis machining. You can see this part in the corner there. It's got a curved floor surface, right? Now multi axis machining enables the user to easily program parts like this with curved surfaces, with types of pockets, things like aerospace frames, or even some production parts. Large parts have surface pockets. And we have roughing and finishing cycles as well.

There's also been a focus on the types of tools. So the finishing cycles are the focus of supporting circle segment cutters, like the barrel mill, or lens tip cutters. Barrel mills, I mean that's a word or phrase you've heard a lot, and people have been talking about for a long time. So with the multi axis machining finish, you can use barrel tools.

Next one is geodesic. Now geodesic machining can create a generic 5-axis toolpath on arbitrary meshes, any type of mesh, also with undercuts. Undercuts are a very important part of geodesic. And you can take a single mesh or multiple meshes, and the pattern can be driven with some guiding curves, or some [? morphed ?] curves as an input. So it doesn't really matter what type of part a model is. You can create any type of toolpath, any type of finishing toolpath, on any shape without any tilting.

And the biggest value there is really achieving this type of finishing toolpath for parts just like this one, which have a lot of undercut areas.

So that was the last toolpath strategy I'm going to cover. It was very general. But over the next releases, you'll see the ModuleWorks technology, and you'll be able to use it, and try it, and I'm also looking forward to hear about what the Fusion 360 user base is thinking after the machine [? departs ?] with these.

So earlier on, I had to be continued on one of my slides. Well that story is going to continue now to an end. So what do we see in the future? That's what I want to ask. Because I spoke about the past about how 5-axis was in the end of the 90s. I talked about ModuleWorks and what type of impact we had. We touched on Fusion 360 generally and what the near term goal is there. And you saw what's going to be released in the near future.

But what do we see in 10 years' time? Well, 10 years is a long time. I'll try and keep it simple. Well, job shops, they will be able to manufacture much more easily. This may be something you've already experienced now, maybe something that you've been hearing from companies and people for a long time. But it will happen. It's inevitable.

CAM will be able to be used by anyone, an entry level [? NT ?] programmer, somebody who's highly skilled, somebody who's shifted from one type of production or area to another one. It should be able to be used by anyone.

Some of you may already think, hey, I never used to CAM before I used Fusion 360. So maybe you already feel that the future is upon us.

The next thing is, it won't matter if it's a CNC machine. We've got a post-processing, we've got CNC machine parts. But it won't matter, if it's a CNC machine or a 3D printer, because you may have one now. You may have on in future, or even robots. In the future, I think it won't matter how things are going to be produced and that the software technology will make it happen.

That's the end. Thanks very much for watching this industry talk.