What if cars could walk?

Combining form, function, beauty, and cost efficiency

Tasked with designing and optimizing the chassis and legs for the vehicles, Autodesk Research’s Industry Futures team used their digital capabilities in modeling, rendering, generative design, and finite element analysis to design, beautify, verify, and simulate the components of the concept vehicle. To further validate the functionality of the vehicle components, the Research team leveraged the Autodesk Technology Centers’ fabrication capabilities in subtractive and additive manufacturing to create carbon fiber 3D prints of the legs for the Paraklete X-2, before creating a small prototype of the full vehicle.

Once the prototype was complete, the focus turned to the interior, tackling the seat for the Elevate vehicle. With an objective from Hyundai to design a seat that was lightweight, structurally stiff, cost-effective, and aesthetically pleasing, the Research team applied Autodesk’s generative design technology to create an open gyroid seat design. The design not only showcased a beautiful high performance lattice structure, which boasted a high stiffness to mass ration, it was also extremely lightweight. The spine design reduced weight by 50% and the wing design by 55%. In addition, the seat design allowed for manufactures to leverage the benefits of additive manufacturing by eliminating the need for a jig, as the parts were designed to interconnect requiring only a clamp enabling welding to occur right away. This innovative approach to manufacturing meant significant costs could be gained during mass production.