Robotic Fabrication

Human-Robot Interaction research in manufacturing process

Interactive digital fabrication in creative process

Robotic fabrication experiment
Concrete Surface Finishing
Ongoing research conducted at the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, here presents the robotic fabrication process of this research.
Advisor: Joshua Bard
In this ongoing research, the research group has proven that the Profile 3D printing concept can be used for successfully fabricating complex 2.5D geometries. However, the technology is still at the experimental stage and far from mature for industrial scale mass production. Funded by a grant from the Manufacturing Futures Initiative, the project group continues to strive towards creating an industry-ready technology demonstrator.
Concept sketch of the final version of the robot cell: The work table is monitored by a 3D-scanning device, which detects errors in the panel geometry. An overhead projector overlays the information on the panel, guiding the operator in real time



Lizzee Feeds America
Interactive Digital Fabrication in Creative Process
Yi-Chin Lee and Matt Prindible, collaborate with Pittsburgh local artist, Lizzee Solomon.
More detail on Human-Machine Virtuosity blog post: https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/16-455/s2019/1296/prepare/
The capacity to explore physical artistic work in abstraction through digital transformation and fabrication is conceptually simple, but technically challenging. Our “machine-in-the-loop” workflow is comprised of a laser scanner to generate a point cloud of the artist’s sculpture, software to create a watertight mesh of that point cloud, parametric design software to procedurally transform the mesh, a slicing tool for generating toolpaths for severely damaged 3D models, a 3D printer capable of working through tooling errors, and a vacuum form table to prepare the final model. The tool of intervention for our artist was air drying clay and Super Sculpey in addition to some basic sculpting tools. An oven was also involved. We used this workflow to generate a series of machine “responses” to the artist’s sculpture. The artist then created a response this response. And so on. Our goal was to enable to “dialog” between the artist and machine that helped the artist explore unexpected shapes and gestures. Our technical exploration was successful and, based on this functional experimental workflow and a conversation with our artist, our artistic exploration was also successful.
Hybrid Workflow

Hotdog Collection

Dinner Table Setting




Precedent and Cited Works
Three pieces of existing work were referenced early and often throughout the process. Robin Sloan’s Flip Flop, Navaneeth R Nair’s Wave-form, and Geoffrey Mann’s Cross-fire. As well as a million YouTube tutorials.
The ultimaker clip in deom video is cut from the ultimaker official wesite
Robotic Wire Winding
Course project : Introduction to Architecture Robotic, School of Architecture, CMU, 2018 Fall
Team : Yi-Chin Lee, JoonYong Choi, Kyle Bancrof
Instructor: Ardavan Bidgoli
In this project, we tended to use the industrial robot to do the wire winding. Manual wire winding needs lots of effort, and the form is hard to control due to the material properties. By manipulating the robot and router table, we produced the wire winding unit, and it could finally assemble into space scale room partition. The work includes research the wire winding technique, program robot to move in a specific pattern, design the end of arm tool for the robot, design the work object, integrate each element into the workflow and design the final products.

Tool design
The most significant part of the wire feeding tool is how to keep the tension of the wire and prevent it from rotating backward. To solve this problem, we designed a ratchet to control the proper tension needed for the whole workflow.


Work Object Design
The critical part of the module is the connection between each module. Therefore, if the design of the module includes the connection in any way, the geometry of the module can be quite various. The work object is designed to consider such aspect of module design which enables the diverse design exploration. We designed the different shape of small panels that can be layered to create objects where the wire can be bent and form a certain shape.


