ARCHITECTURAL ROBOTICS

Scope

2020

Project Team: Lauren Stokes, Emma VanZante

Disciplines

Digital Fabrication

Architectural Design

Premise

As technology and robotics continue to integrate with design, how can we use these tools to begin to think about the possibilities of their integration?

Using a KUKA robotic arm, we investigated the limits of both completely digital drawings and robotically drawn drawings. The results are shown at right.

Setup

Utilizing premade scripts developed in Grasshopper, we created a multi-layer file containing varying shapes, sizes, and methods of drawings. Not knowing what would happen when you give a robot a marker, we felt these shapes could offer a variety of movements and overlapping instances to incur a dynamic exploration of robotic activity.

Drawing

With the KUKA robotic arm in place, we ran the machine that drew the document for us. Periodically we would adjust the paper or the marker it was holding, but the results can be seen directly above. The left photo shows the computer-based output and the right photo shows the robotically-created drawing. 

At the end of each "layer" we would change the pen color on the end-of-arm attachment.

While we thought the drawing would be a replica of the Grasshopper file, it still has many unique characteristics (fading, blotting, line weight variation) that couldn't be duplicated by hand or by robot. 

This introduction to robotics was a gateway to how emerging technology can collaborate with architecture to form new processes or allow for additional possibilities in the field of design.