Architects
of innovation
It seems to be an increasingly frequent occurrence that well-established industries are being disrupted
by newcomers entering from other fi elds, most usually hailing from the tech sector or other online
businesses, but architecture? Andrew Allcock has more
The result is Eva and related programming software
Dame Zaha Hadid’s Venice
installation (centre) that
spurred Automata
Technologies’ founders to
develop affordable, easy-to-use-
and-deploy robot technology
Wikipedia says this about architect the late
Opera House in China and the Beijing Daxing
International Airport, also in China.”
But it was her sculpture for the Gallery of
in a London-based technical support group
tasked with realising Hadid’s creations to
Automata Technologies, set up in 2015.
Choreograph, which together deliver a low-cost, plug-andplay,
easily programmable, table-top collaborative robotic
arm that, its creators say, will democratise robotics. Eva
has a 1.25 kg capacity, reach of 700 mm, precision of
±0.5 mm, traverse speed of 0.75 m/sec, costs from
£8,000 and takes just 15 minutes to set up. Its nearest
competition is Universal Robots’ UR3 at around £17,000.
Of Chinese robots that start at £17,000, Automata says
these are not seen as a realistic prospect for
“productivity-driven customers”.
Choreograph software can be run on any machine with
a browser and supports visual programming via the
browser, de ning points, or via a teach method of guiding
the robot and recording positions. It is entirely visual,
there’s no code to write (although python scripts can
additionally be employed). The sequence in which
programmed points is visited can be edited. There’s
Dame Zaha Hadid: “She was described by The
Guardian of London as the ‘Queen of the
curve’, who ‘liberated architectural geometry, giving it a
whole new expressive identity’. Her major works include
the aquatic centre for the London 2012 Olympics,
Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum in the
US, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Guangzhou
Venice Biennale 2012, a 6 m tall, self-supporting
folded aluminium structure that led two of those
challenge existing robot design and programming –
Suryansh Chandra and Mostafa El Sayed, founders of
10 November 2019 www.machinery.co.uk @MachineryTweets
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