Sam Wilcock

Robotic construction and digital fabrication

Posts

Miscellaneous musings, newest first.

2026

  1. One kit of flat panels, many curved shells: a reconfigurable 3D-printed joint

    How a finite kit of ten flat panel types and one adjustable 3D-printed vertex joint can build doubly curved shells, from our IASS 2026 paper.

  2. Heterogeneous robot teams for cluttered construction sites

    A fixed robot arm and a mobile rover share the job of assembly on a messy site: the rover scouts and tracks panels, the arm places them, and a person supervises by voice.

  3. Cyberwave and the joyful plumbing of a cloud-connected lidar

    Integrating a Waveshare D500 lidar with a UGV Beast through Cyberwave, ROS 2, and a digital twin workflow.

2025

  1. New Arch // Struct Lab website

    I built the new Arch // Struct Lab (AS Lab) website at the Politecnico di Milano to showcase the lab's research projects and publications in one place.

  2. Kinetic Harlequin: an interactive kinetic sculpture simulating nature through discrete mechanisms

    A kinetic sculpture driven by servomotors, constructed for Milan Design Week 2025.

2024

  1. Network visualisation

    An interactive network graph of robotics topics, built with Retina.

  2. Snake in the terminal with Python and curses

    A late-night terminal Snake game in Python using UniCurses, with super foods and teleporting. Full code included.

  3. W.AMCA 24 Gallery

    Images from the Workshop on Additive Manufacturing and Construction Automation 2024

  4. Light painting

    Light painting with a Fanuc CR10ia/L and Python

  5. Whispers from a summer nest - Milano 2024

    An international summer workshop in Milan on building with reused materials.

2023

  1. Controlling the KUKA iiwa from Grasshopper and ROS: Room g02a guide

    Step-by-step setup for driving the KUKA LBR iiwa in Leeds room g02a from Rhino/Grasshopper through ROS and COMPAS: installs, simulation, real control and the gripper.

2022

  1. Be Curious 2022: AprilTag control of a PincherX robot arm

    Families at the University of Leeds' Be Curious day steered a PincherX robot arm with an AprilTag paddle and a webcam, through a sweet-powered pick-and-place task.

  2. Leeds International Summer School 2022 - Digital design and fabrication

    Leeds International Summer School Course

2021

  1. Playing with Particle Swarm Optimisation

    Quick study of PSO for a few test functions

  2. Creating a robot reachability map

    Scoring a manipulator's workspace by testing how many orientations inverse kinematics can reach at each point of a voxel grid, following Zacharias et al. (2007).

2020

  1. Grasshopper to ROS: sending Rhino geometry to a robot arm

    Sending generatively designed geometry from Rhino and Grasshopper over ROS2, following COMPAS FAB, so a simulated robot arm can plan with MoveIt around it.

  2. ROS2 and MoveIt2 demo: motion planning for a Denso VS068 arm

    A first ROS2 and MoveIt2 demo: a Denso VS068 manipulator exported from SolidWorks to URDF and motion-planned in RViz, with video and setup notes.

  3. Rhino/Iris Test

    Three.js model posting test

  4. You say tomato, I say To-Mammon

    Lockdown: Creative inspiration or gradual insanity?

  5. Starting off

    This is my first blog post, as a test