Building a Bridge with Flying Robots

Abstract

All Bent Out… explores adaptive fabrication techniques for robotically constructing steam-bent wood assemblies. The following paper discusses a constellation of hardware and software tools that leverage the material constraints of steam bending (e.g. spring back, irregular grain) as opportunities to develop adaptive fabrication workflows where predetermined machine tasks can be informed by sensor-based events. In particular, research in coordinated motion control of two industrial robots and environmental sensing help to negotiate discrepancies between intended, digitally modeled geometries and actual, physically bent wood assemblies.