Workshop using Rhino, Grasshopper, Karamba and Kangaroo to design developable strips, and then RhinoCAM and the Robots plug-in for fabrication.
The Workshop “Developable Strips: From Flat to Twisted” spanned from the theoretical background of developable surfaces - specifically the sub-category of 'strips' which can be unfolded into rectangles on the plane – through to the robotic fabrication of a lighting appliance.
The design method involved physics simulation with Kangaroo in which geometrical constraints forced a real time deformation to maintain the properties of a developable strip.
The resulting 3D strips were discretized into strings of planar quadrilaterals in which the position and angle of the crease lines along each strip together with the angle of bending required at each crease line summarize how to transform the 2D strips into their 3D corollaries.
As a result, the strips could be fabricated from rectangular metal strips (of approx. 1000 x 80 x 2mm) in two digital manufacturing steps: the first, 3-axis CNC milling, preparing the crease lines as a set of small holes drilled across the strips, and the second, robotic bending, in a set-up where the robot added the required bend angles to each crease line in a fully-automated process that included all the manipulation required from picking up the flat strips in a pick-up jig to completing the bending process at all crease lines along the strips' length.