Congratulations Laura Lovell-Anderson for her one-year research residency at Autodesk

The project will integrate industrialized construction and two industrial manufacturing processes into one custom designed, fabricated, and engineered end of arm tooling that is attached to a large payload industrial robot. In doing so, the capacities of forming structural profiles (e.g. steel tube, I-beams, angle iron) for interior and architectural use are expanded. The two industrial processes that will be integrated are incremental profile forming (IPF) with induction bending (IB). Novel technologies, interfaces, and methods will be investigated to develop new knowledge of the architectural potentials for robotic incremental forming of structural profiles for the physical articulation of geometrically complex designs through robotic programming. This study will utilize an experimental research design to develop a novel automation approach that combines the two separate semi-automated manufacturing processes of IPF and IB into to a single and fully automated process through the use of a six-axis industrial robotic arm with custom engineered and fabricator end effector. In a variable-based approach to technologically-oriented research, the experimental set-up will provide for testing robot control, developing a procedure and defining the variables (degrees of freedom, task regularity, synchronicity, load testing, etc.) of integrating IB and IPF, and defining a database which contains a list of equipment, settings, order of coded operations, etc. 

Our team is comprised of experts and thought leaders from industry (PARTISANS & Sixpenny Architectural Fabrication), academia (Ryerson University), and entrepreneurial communities