Robot-Assisted Rapid Prototyping for Ice Sculptures

Ice has long been used by humankind for practical purposes, and more recently for artistic purposes as well. Nowadays, the field of ice construction is becoming more commerically relevant, with increased interest in ice tourism and specifically ice hotels. As a result, there is a market for automating ice construction, and building detailed structures that would otherwise require a significant amount of manual work. To address this demand, the authors are currently developing experimental robotic systems for building ice structures: the Fab@home, for building structures on the small-scale, and the Adept Cobra 600 robot, for building structures on the medium-scale. Further software and hardware development is needed for the Cobra since it was not designed for rapid prototyping, and certainly not for rapid prototyping using ice as the working material. The authors have designed and built fluid delivery systems for each machine to permit the use of water as the building material. A signal processing subsystem permits control of the water-delivery flow rate and synchronization with the robot motion. Additionally, for the Cobra, we have developed a slicing algorithm to generate toolpaths for the Cobra using stereolithography (STL) files as the input.