This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time! They’re literally forming aerospace parts from materials up to and including titanium by precisely pinching wall sized sheets of metal...
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time! They’re literally forming aerospace parts from materials up to and including titanium by precisely pinching wall sized sheets of metal between two robotic arms using a couple of tonnes of force on a ~10mm end tool.
The video itself is great, too: the CEO is very clearly an incredible engineer who’s genuinely excited to talk about the process, and the actual mathematical basis behind this whole thing pretty rapidly gets absurdly impressive when you realise it’s moving out of “spherical chickens in a vacuum” world and into “the forces involved can deflect the robot by up to 7mm from where it thinks it is and I’m trying to account for that while forming a 2mm thick sheet in a dynamic process that constantly changes its geometry and equilibrium”.
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time! They’re literally forming aerospace parts from materials up to and including titanium by precisely pinching wall sized sheets of metal between two robotic arms using a couple of tonnes of force on a ~10mm end tool.
The video itself is great, too: the CEO is very clearly an incredible engineer who’s genuinely excited to talk about the process, and the actual mathematical basis behind this whole thing pretty rapidly gets absurdly impressive when you realise it’s moving out of “spherical chickens in a vacuum” world and into “the forces involved can deflect the robot by up to 7mm from where it thinks it is and I’m trying to account for that while forming a 2mm thick sheet in a dynamic process that constantly changes its geometry and equilibrium”.