Hasso-Plattner-Institut
Prof. Dr. Patrick Baudisch
 

AirTied: Automatic Personal Fabrication of Truss Structures

Lukas Rambold, Robert Kovacs,Conrad Lempert, Muhammad Abdullah, Helena Lendowski, Lukas Fritzsche, Martin Taraz, and Patrick Baudisch

We present AirTied, a device that fabricates truss structures in a fully automatic fashion. AirTied achieves this by unrolling a 20cm-wide inflatable plastic tube and tying nodes into it. AirTied creates nodes by holding onto a segment of tube, stacking additional tube segments on top of it, tying them up, and releasing the result. The resulting structures are material-efficient and light as well as sturdy, as we demonstrate by creating a 6m-tower. Unlike the prior art, AirTied requires no scaffolding and no building blocks, bringing automated truss construction into the reach of personal fabrication

Publication

Lukas Rambold, Robert Kovacs,Conrad Lempert, Muhammad Abdullah, Helena Lendowski, Lukas Fritzsche, Martin Taraz, and Patrick Baudisch

AirTied: Automatic Personal Fabrication of Truss Structures
in Proceedings of UIST'23 (to appear)