One of the more impressive booths at this week’s Automotive Interiors Expo in Novi is that of leather CAD specialist Gemini, with two of the company’s latest Thagora leather cutting machines on show. Gemini is sharing the booth with its chosen dies partner, Ontario Die International.
Gemini is displaying its third-generation leather scanning machine, which is used to analyze and mark the hides, and its cutting machine, which features augmented reality.
Project manager Bogdan Nacu explains, “Our software controls the whole leather cutting room in a factory, including importing the digital models, creating the production orders, inspecting the hides and nesting them. We are the only company in the world to use a nesting algorithm running on a GPU, which makes it more efficient because we can run more computational strategies in the same amount of time.
“Traditionally, clients do the inspection, nesting and cutting hide by hide. We do that separately, so we are able to nest multiple hides. Thanks to multiple models, we can combine them and get an increase in efficiency.”
Once the hide is scanned and nested, it is transferred to the die-cutting table, where the hide is identified by its barcode and the cutting pattern is projected onto the hide, so the operator knows exactly which die to place where. “This allows the operator to place the dies faster.”
