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This Advanced Robotic Arm Will Carve Your Designs Out of Foam

An industrial-grade robot is only a click away in 'ROBOCHOP,' the upcoming installation from Kram/Weisshaar's.
ROBOCHOP by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram: KUKA Model KR60 robot and floor mounted hot wire cutting tool in action. Photo © Jürgen Schwope. Images courtesy KRAM/WEISSHAAR.

There are a million ways to build a chair or an abstract sculpture, but few that use an industrial-grade robot, and even fewer that let you design your masterpiece from the comfort of your browser. ROBOCHOP is a large-scale installation that combines a web-based 3D sculpture tool with an adaptive, specially-coded chopping arm that lets you "make anything," co-creator Clemens Weisshaar, 1/2 of Kram/Weisshaar (with Reed Kram) told Wallpaper*.

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The project puts the articulating robotic arm at the disposal of anyone with access to the ROBOCHOP site. "From traffic to industry to the home we are already surrounded by a massive number of connected devices," Kram/Weisshaar explained to The Creators Project. "As the communication between all of these is being streamlined there is huge potential that is yet to be unleashed." Thus, over the course of March 16-20 at Code_n in Hanover, the duo will be putting these possibilities to the test by feeding crowd-created designs to the robot, which will quickly and easily carve them out of 2,000 foam blocks using a red-hot wire.

ROBOCHOP by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram during development and testing phase at KRAM/WEISSHAAR Munich. Photo © Matthias Ziegler

What makes ROBOCHOP so promising is that it uses "smart" programming to figure out cutting methods for itself. "99% of all robots on this planet (there are an estimated 3,000,000 units) repeat one or maximum five programs. ROBOCHOP is able to write programs on the fly," Weisshaar and Kram explain. This makes it an ideal outlet for something like the Internet of Things, which could direct nearly endless input to such a multi-purpose tool.

Plus, as the primary goal involves "Boiling down the process to become so simple that absolutely anyone can start drawing in 3D without installing software," its creators explain, "ROBOCHOP is completely web-based and cross platform—it works on any device."

In the past, Kram and Weisshaar have used robot arms for OUTRACE, a 2010 light painting project in London's Trafalgar Square. And while 2,000 foam blocks is no small feat, ROBOCHOP is just a small taste of their technology's implications. In the future, the duo predict, "We'll see a lot of very fluid, discreet applications that turbo boost the physical world as it is today."

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Click here to start designing for yourself.

ROBOCHOP App interface by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram. Photo © Jürgen Schwope

Check out more of Kram/Weisshaar's work here.

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