Building the 2m Dar Smart Bridge

Colleagues in Autodesk Research have been working with Dar Al-Handasah on a project to 3D print a series of footbridges with integrated sensors. It’s similar in some ways to MX3D’s Smart Bridge Amsterdam, but printing with plastic rather than steel.

I’ve talked about the bridge at a couple of events, now, so I thought it was time to share some more information about this fascinating project.

My role in the project is, once again, fairly minor: I’ve been helping with the visualization of sensor data from the bridge inside Dasher (more on that later on), but it’s been fun to have watched the project unfold from afar. Many thanks to Peter Storey, James Donnelly and the rest of the project team for sharing the information and imagery included in this post.

Here’s an introductory video describing the project:

Fusion 360 was used to generatively design the initial, 2 metre-long bridge to be printed using ABS. 2 metres is actually a rather short bridge – as you’ll see at the…

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