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Artistic robotic surface processing for stone (AROSU)
Start date: Dec 1, 2013, End date: Nov 30, 2015 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Natural stone industry has a crucial importance at European level, and the overall worldwide demand for natural stone products is experiencing a steady growth; however, in the last years globalization is transforming the competitive scenario at a fast pace, with high technology available to most of worldwide players, who are able to offer good alternatives at extremely affordable prices; quality alone is therefore not able to keep up with the price gap, and the result is that the traditional European sculpturing and artistic stone processing is becoming an endangered art.It’s mandatory that the processes of artistic stone processing urgently evolves technologically to remain competitive in the international market, maintaining the inimitable artistic touch, at the same time keeping up with the new industrial requirements in terms of productivity and lean manufacturing.The main goal of the AROSU project is to advance and facilitate traditional artisan and art-work with new technologies, helping the European stone industry to lower their production costs by automating various production steps through a new flexible production concept. AROSU will implement a novel production concept able to extend industrial robot usage as an active assistant during the complex and demanding artistic work of hard natural stone carving. This will be achieved through the implementation of a novel robot cell able to produce artistic looking surfaces by implementing the following core components. 1) new robot mounted pneumatic chisel tool; 2)automated path generation from geometry data provided by a design interface for architects and artists. With AROSU it will be possible to improve the competitiveness of the stone processing industry, by drastically increasing the production efficiency through a novel co-operative workspace, in which sculptors and the robotic work-cell can jointly work on the natural product, with a vast range of different products with different sizes.
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