— Project

Robotic Folding

— Client

Studio Joris Laarman

— Collaborator

RoboFold

— Exhibitions

Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA

Laarman Lab

Friedman Benda Gallery, New York, USA

— Publications

Inside Smart Geometry, Wiley, 2013

Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design, AIC/Yale University Press, 2010

The collaboration with RoboFold was based around creating a proof of concept system for the company’s proposed robotic manufacturing system. The concept of the system is that flat sheets can be CNC scored using curved fold lines and then folded into a 3d form using a group of collaborating robot arms. To create this system off the shelf educational robot arms were outfitted with custom end effectors, hardware controllers, and software. The behaviour was created using software developed in Maya that could be used to calculated the trajectory of each of the arms in tandem with the other robots. A test of this system was commissioned by Studio Joris Laarman as a means of prototyping a chair he had designed to be folded out of a single sheet of steel.