A Grammar of Digital Fabrication Machines

Digital fabrication tools for makers have increased access to manufacturing processes such as 3D printing and computer-controlled laser cutting or milling. Despite research advances in novel hardware and software tools for fabrication tasks, there is no formal way to reason about the fabrication machine itself. There is no standard format for representing the high-level features of machines and trade-offs between them; instead, this important information is relegated to folk knowledge. To make machine information explicit, we present Taxon, a machine specification language broad enough to represent many machines, while also allowing for enough expressivity to meaningfully compare and infer performance. We describe and detail the motivation behind the design of Taxon, as well as how Taxon programs compile to a simulation of physical machines. We discuss opportunities for future work in digital fabrication that requires a standard, formalized representation of machines.