RoboCut: Hot-wire Cutting with Robot-controlled Flexible Rods


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Date

2020-07-08

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

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Rights / License

Abstract

© 2020 ACM. Hot-wire cutting is a subtractive fabrication technique used to carve foam and similar materials. Conventional machines rely on straight wires and are thus limited to creating piecewise ruled surfaces. In this work, we propose a method that exploits a dual-arm robot setup to actively control the shape of a flexible, heated rod as it cuts through the material. While this setting offers great freedom of shape, using it effectively requires concurrent reasoning about three tightly coupled sub-problems: 1) modeling the way in which the shape of the rod and the surface it sweeps are governed by the robot's motions; 2) approximating a target shape through a sequence of surfaces swept by the equilibrium shape of an elastic rod; and 3) generating collision-free motion trajectories that lead the robot to create desired sweeps with the deformable tool. We present a computational framework for robotic hot wire cutting that addresses all three sub-problems in a unified manner. We evaluate our approach on a set of simulated results and physical artefacts generated with our robotic fabrication system.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

39 (4)

Pages / Article No.

98

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Organisational unit

09620 - Coros, Stelian / Coros, Stelian check_circle
02284 - NFS Digitale Fabrikation / NCCR Digital Fabrication

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