Phone-scanned foam stock for robotic milling of a sculpted bust

Scan the stock with a phone. Rafael Escobar shows how a large foam block, glued up for a sculpture job, was captured in 3D with Polycam on a mobile phone. That scan then became the workpiece in ENCY CAD/CAM software, so toolpaths follow the real stock instead of an idealised box.

Fit the model, then program the robot. In Rhino a bust of a woman was positioned inside the scanned block to check that it fits. In ENCY Robot the job was built from 2D contouring, a series of level roughing passes and a rotary finishing pass, and the KUKA robot cell was simulated against the scanned stock.

From simulation to the finished bust. The same program then ran on the real robot, milling the foam block into the finished bust shown at the end of the MecDATA video.