Thermomorph

Thermoplastic building envelopes are usually formed with single-use molds, which lock designs into a single draft angle and make complex, variable geometry expensive to produce. This project develops a robotic thermoforming process that is moldless and supports multiple draft angles on the same panel, opening up geometric freedom that conventional thermoforming can't offer.

I helped design a dual-mode robot end-effector that combines a localized heat gun, a forming tip, and an Arduino-controlled infrared thermocouple sensor, with two calibrated tool-center-points and 90° automatic indexing so the robot can switch between heating and forming mid-sequence. To predict how the material would behave before fabrication, I built a fabrication-aware simulation in Grasshopper using Flexhopper and Python, modeling heat distribution and deformation and validating it against 3D scans of the physical panels.

We tested the workflow on a full-scale, five-panel PETG prototype (0.8 × 1.6 m), using an ABB IRB 4600-60 robot with RobotStudio/RAPID, and the workflow supports multi-robot coordination to reduce manual repositioning. The result: a 60% reduction in forming time and an average geometric deviation of just 1.61 ± 1.18 mm across the panels, assembled on site with AR guidance built in Unity.

This work is published in the CAADRIA 2025 Proceedings (Tokyo, Japan).