Integrated Design and Robotized Prototyping of Abeille’s Vaults

This chapter discusses a continuous process allowing the design, simulation, and automation of the robotic fabrication of stereotomic vaults obtained by adapting the stone elements bond typical of a flat vault designed in 1699 by the French engineer Joseph Abeille to a spherical surface. This process is based on the joint use of Wolfram Mathematica for the geometric modelling, and Grasshopper in combination with the HAL Robot Programming and Control plug-in for the feasibility analysis, the automated generation of toolpaths, the simulation of the movements of the robot, the dynamic calibration of the end-effector, and the programming of the machining tasks.