Case Study: Carnegie Mellon University achieves faster, more complex robot fabrication with Robotmaster

Carnegie Mellon successfully exploiting manufacturing robots

Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture, through its Digital Fabrication Lab (dFAB), needed a way to program a new 6-axis ABB robot with 7th-axis rotary table for complex architectural fabrication. Their challenge was finding a fast, accurate, and practical method to generate robot paths for milling 3D designs in foam and other soft materials without relying on slow or overly difficult manual programming. Robotmaster’s CAD/CAM for robots software was selected to fit into the team’s existing Mastercam workflow.

Robotmaster enabled CMU to create offline 6-axis robot code directly from CAD files, and the system was up and running quickly with support and just two days of on-site training. The result was a major boost to dFAB’s workflow: the lab could produce complex parts faster and more accurately, expand its robot cell with tool changing, vacuum table, and spindle/gripper switching, and work at a level of part complexity that would otherwise be extremely difficult. Carnegie Mellon described Robotmaster as a critical link to the robot and an essential part of its manufacturing process.

Carnegie Mellon University

Jeremy Ficca

Director