This project documents a 1-week workshop that introduced students to the COMPAS framework. Our goal was to design a tile mosaic that would be part of a collaborative pick-and-place workflow with the UR5, incorporating COMPAS Fab, Kangaroo (Grasshopper), and ROS. Our design took a bottom-up approach, embracing the randomness of tile size and color, and ultimately finding order through the integration of vector fields to align the tiles in a specific direction. After taking a step back from our work, we saw its value as a potential wayfinding solution for the built environment.
Our design was simple, utilizing three different sizes and colors of Cycles, that were cut out of Aludibond. Each one has a small cut in it, we wanted to use these to indicate some kind of information. in the image below, we have the three tiles we are using on the left. On the right are the three tiles rotated in a direction, which we want to use for wayfinding.
The slits in the circles could always point in a desired direction, helping lead people somewhere or guide the eye to a certain position. It is a subtle cue that can be implemented into many different locations.
Digital Workflow
The tiles are packed into a bounding area where the kangaroo circle packing simulation is applied. Once the tiles are nested, the orientation of the tiles is then pivoted to align with the vector field applied over the bounding area. Once the design stage is complete, the tiles are sorted in order of distance from the 0,0 point – this sorting process corresponds to the placing order in the robotic workflow. Each tile output contains metadata regarding the tile’s color, position, and orientation.