Students at the Barlett School of Architecture, part of the University College London, have created 3D printed chair designs using robots.
The “Spatial Curves” project aimed at developing a 3D printing technique to create complex curved structures. Team CurVoxels, comprising of students Hyunchul Kwon, Amreen Kaleel and Xiaolin Li, equipped a robot arm with a custom nozzle that is able to extrude plastic filament “in the air”. Based on the original Panton chair by Danish designer Verner Panton, the group 3D printed several new versions called Cantilever Chairs.
“The Panton chair is voxelised, a process of dividing an object into ‘volumetric pixels’. These voxels are then translated into a basic spatial curve, which can adopt different orientations, generating an overall pattern throughout the chair. The size of the voxels changes depending on the amount of stress in the chair, distributing different material densities.”
CurVoxels examined twelve different design issues in the first simulation.
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