Shapeways: Helping Robots Do Graffiti since 2011

May 8, 2012

The international Association for Robots in Architecture got their hands on a KUKA KR16-2 robot which of course means they had to program the robot to start spraying walls with the sort of style that would make the Graffiti Research Lab proud… But how do you get a robot to hold the spray gun? Enter Shapeways 3D printing.

The gripper was printed as a single piece with movable parts, using selective laser sintering – so to get a working gripper, they only had to add two servo motors, connected to an Arduino board. The main challenge was then to find a way to let the industrial robot communicate with the Arduino board, to close and open the gripper at the appropriate time. A similar Arduino-based strategy was used to operate a spraygun, the mounting piece was also 3D printed by Shapeways!

Check out the video of the robot in action….