For my thesis, I wanted to explore a new way to push boundaries of the current manufacturing process, Robotic Incremental Sheet Forming (RISF) to enable it to be used within different industries. The main focus was to improve the art and design industries ability to work with metal while preserving their main tool, their hands. This project allows an artist to hand draw artwork onto a piece of metal and the suggested process would take an image, extract the artwork and perform the RISF technique to emboss the artwork into the metal. The conclusion of this research was successful and the outlined approach above was implemented with impressive results.
This project utilised Rhino, Grasshopper, a UR10 robotic arm, aluminium sheets and a Intel Realsense camera. The process and results of this hardware and software combination can be seen in the video below and the resulting pictures.
