There are lots of cool ways to make furniture: you can burn it with a laser, or smash a box with a hammer until it’s comfortable. You could also get a human to make it with their hands, though that seems less fun somehow.
But the RoboChop might be the most fun method of all.
This new droid, to be unveiled at CeBIT 2015 on March 16 in Hanover, will use a combination of 2,000 polystyrene blocks and the imaginations of the internet to design and built abstract furniture.
The robot is equipped with a slicing hot wire tool, which can manipulate and destroy 50cm-cubed blocks in fun and interesting ways - as determined by people who have paid for the privilege online. The results will then be send to them to use as furniture - or, perhaps, just weird pieces of expensively cut-up material.
The installation is the work of Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram and the GFT Group, and forms part of the Code_n competition.
The project is described as follows:
"ROBOCHOP envisions a not so distant future where smart systems empower citizens to directly engage with heavy industrial fabrication technology without obstacles or intermediaries to create the exact item they want."