CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The School of Architecture has a new fabrication tool for students to use in building objects they’ve designed.
Its industrial robotic arm is the largest on campus. Students will be able to cut materials at angles and in shapes that they can’t do with the other fabrication tools.
The School of Architecture purchased the robotic arm for its Detail and Fabrication Program in 2015, with the help of funding from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the College of Fine and Applied Arts. The school recently received additional donor funding for training on safety and use of the arm.
Kevin Erickson, an architecture professor and the program chair of the Detail and Fabrication Program, said the students working with the robotic arm will learn a new process of working. They’ll be more involved in the construction of their designs, rather than handing off their drawings and letting someone else interpret and build them.
“This will close that gap between ideation and realization,” Erickson said.
Faculty from both architecture and the School of Art and Design recently participated in training on how to use the robotic arm. They learned how to manually program the tool to perform specific moves.
Vincent Lee, a graduate student in architecture who was also in the training workshop, made the first cut with the robotic arm. Using a drill bit tool, Lee used the arm to make spherical and angled cuts on a piece of foam – movements the fabrication lab’s CNC router will not allow.
The arm can bend and swivel on six axes and rotate 360 degrees around its base. It has a 9-foot reach from its center, so it can be used to work on something up to 18 feet long. Lee said once faculty and students learn the software used with the robotic arm, they can program it to perform more complex operations.
“We’ll have more control and precision over the details of objects we couldn’t really control before,” Lee said.
Erickson is teaching a class this spring on robotics and architecture. Lee, who has experience in digital fabrication, is working as a research assistant for the class, looking at how the robotic arm can be used in fabrication projects.
Erickson has challenged his students to use the arm to make a canoe, in order to demonstrate how the arm is capable of working on the inside and outside of an object to make curves on multiple sides.
“We’ve been exploring various ways that digital fabrication in general can impact design, and designing things with fabrication in mind,” said Jane McClintock, a graduate student in architecture who is in Erickson’s class.
“One of the things that is really interesting about it, aside from the level of accuracy you can attain, is the level of change. Things can be instantly customizable as long as you can program it,” McClintock said. “With the robot, you can make a lot of really unique pieces.”
She was intrigued by University of Michigan designers’ use of a robotic arm to create a pavilion out of bent metal rods.
“It’s extremely complicated to bend them all at such precise angles to make them all meet up and make a really abstract shape, but the robot was able to do that,” she said. “They were able to push the limit of what’s possible to fabricate.”
Erickson sees three areas in which other disciplines on campus can help use the robotic arm: computer scientists can contribute to the programming needed to operate it; industrial designers and engineers can design new tools to use with the arm for particular projects; and materials scientists can help determine the types of materials that can be used with the robotic arm to build a designed product.
“I’m not only interested in how architects might use it. I really wanted to have others ask questions I’m not thinking about,” Erickson said. “(Art and design faculty) are going to want to use this in ways I’m not thinking.”