Adaptive Robot Control - New Parametric Workflows Directly from Design to KUKA Robots

In the past years the creative industry has made great advancements in the area of robotics. Accessible robot simulation and control environments based on visual programming systems such as Grasshopper and Dynamo now allow even novice users to quickly and intuitively explore the potential of robotic fabrication, while expert users can use their programming knowledge to create complex, parametric robotic programs. The great advantage of using visual programming for robot control lies in the quick iterations that allow the user to change both geometry and toolpaths as well as machinic parameters and then simulate the results within a single environment. However, at the end of such an iterative optimization process the data is condensed into a robot control data file, which is then copied over to the robot and thus loses its parametric relationship with the code that generated it. In this research we present a newly developed system that allows a dynamic link between the robot and the controlling PC for parametrically adjusting robotic toolpaths and collecting feedback data from the robot itself - enabling entirely new approaches towards robotic fabrication by even more closely linking design and fabrication.