PM Network - March 2015

Catching Up

The team had just 10 months to design and construct the structure, which included creating all of the code for the robot. Yet it still had to spend time managing and aligning both public and private stakeholders, such as the state’s forestry department and the companies manufacturing the timber and robot.

“There were so many different parties involved, so it took a while for everyone to get in sync,” Mr. Schwinn says. The team lost several weeks trying to get its proposal approved. Schedule adjustments had to be made to make up for that time.

“Because of the limited time frame, we moved the optimization stage to the end of the project,” Mr. Schwinn says. “Now we’re evaluating how the process unfolded and how the system behaves over time. Then we learn from it and try improve the tools that we used.”

Training the Robots

The project team had to focus not just on the design parameters of the robot that would fabricate the intricate finger-joint pattern along the perimeter of each plate. The team also had to consider the design parameters of the project’s other digitally controlled machines—such as the Hundegger Speed-Panel Machine, which cut the large plywood panels before the robot created the joints. The Hundegger also cut the pavilion’s wood-fiber insulation and cladding layers.

“This ultimately meant that we had to develop similar programming techniques for those machines more or less on the fly in order to be able to use them with the same efficiency as we programmed and used the robot,” Mr. Schwinn says.

Conventional modeling and control techniques
for digitally controlled machines used in the indus-
try usually involve a large
amount of manual model-
ing work and plausibility
checks, he says.

“Instead, we embedded all the modeling in our rule-based algorithms, which ensured that the fabrication of all individual elements would adhere to the same standards,” Mr. Schwinn says. “If we hadn’t done that, this would have created a significant bottleneck that could have derailed the entire project schedule.”