With the end of the competition and the beginning of the second week, the operations were transferred to the CAAD facilities in Schlieren , were the Kuka robot is situated. The team was introduced to the robot operations, had a first look on the material and made the first test pieces, incising an ytong block with a jigsaw attached to the Kuka’s arm.
The team was then separated in three groups, each one focusing the research on material, computation and fabrication respectively. The team was set up to meet twice per week to exchange information and present the progress of their investigations towards the final design decisions and fabrication methodologies.
Second week Progress
The material group set up a series of tests to examine the material’s resistance strength as well as define the principles of sawing with the jigsaw, so as to inform the process of fabrication. After an intensive shopping session at a local hardware store, various tools, coating materials, adhesives and reinforcement elements were also at our disposal.
Material Limits
Angles of Incision – Joints
The fabrication group was getting familiarized with the Kuka robot: Simple test pieces were produced in order to comprehend the process of data transfer from digital drawing to machine language and finally to the reality of production with several practical constraints. During this week new tools were developed and existing ones were altered to suit the specific needs of production. Thickness of material, precision, speed, wastage, endurance and various limits were investigated and optimized.
managing kuka from MASCAAD1112 on Vimeo.
Material Thickness & Precision of Incision
Hexagon module – Manual fabrication
