Building the 5m Dar Smart Bridge

Now that my head is briefly back above water following Autodesk University 2022 and some time off with the family, I thought I’d revisit the Dar 5m Smart Bridge project to share some of the things I learned about it during AU in New Orleans.

As a reminder, I was not heavily involved in the building of the bridge itself – although I did track it with great interest from a distance – as my role really only came into play in the final stages of the project, when we were looking to get the data from the bridge into Dasher (for both historical and real-time display).

But I did spend close to 3 days talking about the bridge alongside members of the team who built it, so I do feel that I picked up some information that’s likely to be of interest to people.

The first thing to note is that this is the second bridge that Autodesk Research built for – and with the strong participation of – Dar. The first was a 2m bridge that was 3D-printed from carbon fibre-reinforced ABS in our…

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