Informed Design to Robotic Production Systems: Developing Robotic 3D Printing System for Informed Material Deposition

This paper discusses the development of an informed Design-to-Robotic-Production (D2RP) system for additive manufacturing to achieve performative porosity in architecture at various scales. An extended series of experiments on materiality, fabrication and robotics were designed and carried out resulting in the production of a one-to-one scale prototype. In this context, design materiality has been approached from both digital and physical perspectives. At digital materiality level, a customized computational design framework is implemented for form finding of compression only structures combined with a material distribution optimization method. Moreover, the chained connection between parametric design model and robotic production setup has led to a systematic study of certain aspects of physicality that cannot be fully simulated in the digital medium, which then establish a feedback loop for underrating material behaviors and properties. As a result, the D2RP system proposes an alternative method of robotic material deposition to create an informed material architecture.