digifabTURINg – Claystruder code & doc on github

Co-de-iT, team member of the digifabTURINg lab, is happy to announce we started a Github webpage about our robotics explorations. We started releasing the code & documentation about the Claystruder project.

The Claystruder project is part of the digifabTURINg research, that are a research cluster focused about digital fabrication + robotic automation and material research applied in the field of architecture, interaction design and art. digifabTuring rises from a collaboration between several partners: Fablab Torino, Officine Arduino, Co-de-iT with COMAU and Toolbox Coworking.

We have developed an hybrid extruder system to print clay and other dough, that we use with a COMAU NJ60 anthropomorphic arm. The pneumatic system move the clay to the screw conveyor to print the material.

We have developed a Grasshopper definition to, that allow the user to generate the printing toolpath in a simple way. The definition was created to:

• transform toolpath curves into data to control a 6 axis robot movements
• convert the data to COMAU robot programming language PDL2
• do a raw preliminary check of possible collisions between the robot and surrounding objects (basically the work area plane)
• control a clay extruder and simulate its material extrusion path and deposition

Here the link to the github webpage >> https://github.com/Digifabturing/Claystruder