Zenscape

We live in a world full of uncertainties. War, pandemic, inflation, energy shortage, AI, global warming… The overwhelming information from social media exacerbates our anxieties. Some of these crises are new, but the anxiety is not. For hundreds of years, Zen Buddhist monks practiced a type of landscape art called Kare-san-sui, as a way to meditate, and eventually reduce anxieties. Zenscape is a project that explores human-robot collaboration in landscape making, as a new way of art therapy.

There are two essential elements in a traditional Kare-san-sui garden, the rocks and the sand. Rocks represent mountains and constant, while sand resembles water and impermanence. Through raking the sand around the rocks, people observe the fluid movement of sand and practice to focus on the present moment. In Zenscape, humans arrange the rocks, then the robot manipulates the sand based on the size and location of the rocks. This way, the rocks and sand become the interface between human and robot.

This project is conducted in the Computational Design and Digital Fabrication seminar of the Integrative Technologies in Architectural Design and Research (ITECH) program at University of Stuttgart

By Arindam Katoch, Xi Peng, Pengfei Zhang

1. Plywood 10mm thickness
2. White sand
3. Wood stick or twig trimmed to 150mm length
4. Wireless Camera
5. Laptop/PC with Rhino and Grasshopper
6. Robot arm (KUKA KR125 in this example)

Build the wood box in 500 x 500 x 50 mm with the 10mm thick plywood as shown in the photo.

The robot arm end effector has a 3d-printed stick holder (3d file attached below) that can hold a stylus in 45 degrees, that not only avoids blocking the camera views, but also allows better movements of the robot arm. A wireless camera can be attached to the end effector and transfer image data to the laptop.

The laptop communicates with the robot by sending and receiving information through TCP/IP connection between KukaVarProxy on the KUKA KRC and Simulacrum in Grasshopper on the laptop. Simulacrum can be downloaded here: https://github.com/simonlut/Simulacrum

Connect the laptop to the robot PC via Ethernet cable. Change the IP address of the network adapter you're using to be on the same network as the robot, e.g., set it to 141.58.154.177 (Go to Network and Sharing Center, then click on Change adapter settings, etc. Ping the robot IP address (e.g. 141.58.154.149). If this works, proceed to Rhino test.

Download kuka robot code and grasshopper file at:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XXotirrdg5VVZysSt1-_H8G6JxItOblE?usp=sharing

Copy the .src and .dat files to the robot PC. Open the .gh file on laptop and change the IP address in the simulacrum component to the robot IP (e.g.141.58.154.149).

In order to facilitate the interaction, a camera is used as a sensor to take a bitmap image of the rocks from above, then the bitmap is processed in grasshopper to get the shape and location of the rocks.

Based on the boundary lines of the rocks, sand patterns can be generated as curves which then become the robot tool path. Click the start button of the trigger in grasshopper, a list of the points on the robot tool path will be sent to the robot one by one. Changing the interval of the trigger can adjust the speed of the sending the points.