If for some bizarre reason pre-folded origami were ever to become next season's must-have trend (hey, weirder things have happened, it could be like the new Martha's breakout decor), then one PhD student over at Carnegie Mellon's Robotic Institute is going to be well-prepared. Devin Balkcom created the first ever origami-folding robot, which uses an industrial mechanical arm to pick up the paper, rotate it and place it on a worktable, where a ruler descends down and presses the paper into a groove. The resulting origami-shapes look more like the work of your distracted kid-brother and are not as precise as an eager human origami-maker. But if that origami-revolution ever hits we'll know who'll be laughing all the way to the bank. If you go to his website you can see a quicktime clip of the bot making hats and airplanes, http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~devin/. Thursday, September 24, 2009
Origami-robot
If for some bizarre reason pre-folded origami were ever to become next season's must-have trend (hey, weirder things have happened, it could be like the new Martha's breakout decor), then one PhD student over at Carnegie Mellon's Robotic Institute is going to be well-prepared. Devin Balkcom created the first ever origami-folding robot, which uses an industrial mechanical arm to pick up the paper, rotate it and place it on a worktable, where a ruler descends down and presses the paper into a groove. The resulting origami-shapes look more like the work of your distracted kid-brother and are not as precise as an eager human origami-maker. But if that origami-revolution ever hits we'll know who'll be laughing all the way to the bank. If you go to his website you can see a quicktime clip of the bot making hats and airplanes, http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~devin/.