CarraraRobotics – Experiments into Robotics for the Stone Industry

Year: 2013

Location: Carrara, IT

Typology: robotic fabrication research project

Project Team: Andrea Rossi, Lila PanahiKazemi, Pierpaolo Ruttico (lead)

Collaborations: IndexLab (www.indexlab.it), TD Robotics, Nieder, ABB, MGI Marmi & Graniti d’Italia

Carrara Robotics was a one-week research collaboration between IndexLab, TD Robotics, ABB and MGI Marmi.The aim was to explore the possibilities of robotic fabrication for the stone industry. The installation proposed (designed by Lila Panahi Kazemi and Andrea Rossi) is a complex triangulated wall made of marble panels, aseembled on an adaptive steel structure. Instead of constructing a complex and expensive substructure to hang the panels, each component is put into position by an IRB4600 industrial robot, and subsequently weld to the main structure with steel bars.

HAL (http://hal.thibaultschwartz.com/), a Grasshopper plug-in developed by Thibault Schwartz, was used to translate the geometrical informations of each panels into toolpaths for the placement of each of them, and then translate this toolpath in ABB Rapid code instruction, directly driving the robot.