Finally we were successful in bringing the newly developed software and hardware together for a few days of actual fabrication. The results are extremely promising, showing stone structures that would not be possible through manual methods. On-site collaboration between the programming, stone, and robot experts allowed us to extremely quickly iterate variations, rapidly improving the results.
We are again exploring new strategies towards dynamic robotic toolpaths as part of a workshop on incremental forming at Tongji University in Shanghai, China.
A new iteration of the AROSU tool has been released, much more closely emulating the mason's movements. On the programming side, new approaches towards raster-based toolpath generation are explored, with the final goal of allowing users to upload media through a Web-To-Real interface and receiving a custom-structured stone surface with that image. Towards that goal we are investigating how to preview the effect of the tool onto the stone.
The first advanced hands-on experiments are performed at the AROSU demonstrator at TU Dortmund. While the tool is still hand-cranked, we can already achieve first results, though of course without an ideal cycle time. Basic programming is done with an early version of KUKA|prc.
We tested some of the parametric programming strategies that will drive the robotic stone structuring as part of a workshop at USC in Los Angeles, USA. Rather than structuring stone, the international researchers and practitioners work with foam that is hotwire-cut into 3D-shapes.
A team from RiA is taking part at the KUKA System Partner Summit to get a preview into future robot developments that may be relevant for the research project.
AROSU attended the second conference on robotic fabrication in architecture, art, and design – Rob|Arch 2014 at the University of Michigan.
The Institute of Production Systems at TU Dortmund, one of AROSU's research institutions, hosted the next AROSU coordination meeting. With the project now in full go, this was not only a grand tour of their workshop, but involved serious discussions and even the first stone prcoessing experiments.
The consortium was meeting up today at AROSU partner Bamberger Natursteinwerk, where Hermann Graser gave us a tour of their workshop and several huge KUKA KR500 robots for stone milling. Just as exciting were the manual and semi-manual stone processing techniques that are used in parallel.