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RobotSculptor: Artist-Directed Robotic Sculpting of Clay

Published: 30 November 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We present an interactive design system that allows users to create sculpting styles and fabricate clay models using a standard 6-axis robot arm. Given a general mesh as input, the user iteratively selects sub-areas of the mesh through decomposition and embeds the design expression into an initial set of toolpaths by modifying key parameters that affect the visual appearance of the sculpted surface finish. These parameters were identified and extracted through a series of design experiments, using a customized loop tool to cut the water-based clay material. The initialized toolpaths are fed into the optimization component of our system afterwards for optimal path planning, aiming to find the robotic sculpting motions that match the target surface, maintaining the design expression, and resolving collisions and reachability issues. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by designing and fabricating different sculpting styles over a wide range of clay models.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SCF '20: Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication
November 2020
143 pages
ISBN:9781450381703
DOI:10.1145/3424630
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 30 November 2020

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Author Tags

  1. Clay
  2. Digital Fabrication
  3. Path Planning
  4. Robotics
  5. Sculpting

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SCF '20
SCF '20: Symposium on Computational Fabrication
November 5 - 6, 2020
Virtual Event, USA

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  • (2024)SculptDiff: Learning Robotic Clay Sculpting from Humans with Goal Conditioned Diffusion Policy2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS58592.2024.10803054(7307-7314)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
  • (2024)RoPotter: Toward Robotic Pottery and Deformable Object Manipulation with Structural Priors2024 IEEE-RAS 23rd International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)10.1109/Humanoids58906.2024.10769600(843-850)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2024
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