The Hyperbody workshop series presents: Robotic Facade Fabrication

12th-16th December 2011 Hyperbody Robotic Lab, RDM Campus Rotterdam

Five days of folding, simulation and robotic fabrication

When changing a paradigm, it is best not to even try and improve the old one in any way. It is best to start from scratch. RoboFold is an attempt to completely re-think how metal can be formed. It is system that works with the material and not against it. It is a system built around the gentle bends and sharp crease lines of curved folding in sheet material. It is a system that allows a product to exist at many scales through an iterative design and development process, letting hand folding of paper and other materials naturally exist alongside the robotic folding of metal.

read more: Robots and Architecture, an introduction to the emerging trend of robotics in the field of architecture.

Element:   Facade
Leaders:   Gregory Epps (RoboFold) and Daniel Piker (Kangaroo)
Material:  Aluminium sheet
Hardware:  3-axis CNC router and 6-axis industrial robots
Output:  Profiled and folded sheets
Software:  Kangaroo and Lobster (Grasshopper plugins)
Computation:  Physics engine/ inverse kinematics

j.d.feringa AA tudelft DDD nl

Gregory Epps is an empirical engineer, maker, architect, designer, artist and entrepreneur. Through a strong sense of material characteristics and a broad understanding of how things get made, both industrially and by hand, Gregory has come to be a maker of machines that make things. The RoboFold system is the result of 15 years of experimentation in to the design of artifacts through the curved folding of developable surfaces. Most recently, the business was incorporated after Gregory graduated from the Industrial Design engineering joint Masters at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London - in order to commercialise his knowledge and provide a service to fabricate products for architects and designers. The business is now focused on building the RoboFold ecosystem to support the architectural design of cladding solutions.

Daniel Piker is a researcher into geometry and computational design, with a particular interest in the use of interactive physical simulation in the design process. Favouring an open and collaborative approach, he shares much of this work and code online and engages in constant discussion with designers and researchers worldwide. He currently works in the Specialist Modelling Group in Foster and Partners and previously worked in Arup's Advanced Geometry Unit. He has taught design studios at the AA-DRL and Chelsea College of Art, as well as delivering software training to architecture and engineering firms, and consulting for numerous high profile practices. He has presented his work internationally, including the Conference on the Future of Engineering Software in Arizona, and has taught numerous workshops on parametric design, such as the BioDynamic Structures summer school in San Francisco, SmartGeometry2011 in Copenhagen, Branch Point at Strelka institute in Moscow, and Digital Physical at Aarhus school of architecture.