ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | SEPTEMBER 2025 1 7 Traditional metal forming techniques such as stamping and hydroforming have been foundational to industrial manufacturing for decades. These processes rely heavily on geometry-specific tooling, including custom dies and molds, designed to shape sheet metal with precision and repeatability. While highly effective in high-volume production, the lead times and costs associated with tooling design and fabrication have become significant hurdles in today’s manufacturing landscape. Creating a new die or mold can take months and cost millions of dollars, limiting manufacturers’ SHAPING THE FUTURE: INCREMENTAL SHEET METAL FORMING WITH ROBOTICS AND AI New capabilities in sensors and artificial intelligence combine to create a factory of the future that integrates multiple operations in one robotic cell. Punnathat Bordeenithikasem* and Babak Raeisinia, Machina Labs Inc., Chatsworth, California *Member of ASM International i.e., sheet metal forming, trimming, scanning, and heat treating, within a single, containerized robotic cell. Central to the RoboCraftsman is RoboForming, a robotic incremental sheet metal forming process. Using two industrial robotic arms mounted on linear rails with a rigid frame in between them holding up the feedstock sheet metal (Fig. 1), RoboForming shapes metal sheets, layer-by-layer, by following digitally programmed toolpaths derived from CAD models. This method eliminates the months-long process of designing and fabricating dedicated dies or molds, resulting in over 10× reduction ability to quickly iterate designs or respond to sudden shifts in demand[1,2]. FROM TOOLING DEPENDENCY TO SOFTWARE FLEXIBILITY At Machina Labs, the team recognized that advances in robotics, sensors, and artificial intelligence (AI) offered a transformative alternative[3,4]. Since 2019, the company has focused on developing software-defined manu- facturing solutions that decouple production from dedicated tooling. The flagship RoboCraftsman system embodies this approach by integrating multiple manufacturing operations, Fig. 1 — Older (left) and current (right) versions of the RoboCraftsman. The general set up is the same: two robotic arms mounted on separate linear rails with a rigid frame in between them, used to fixture the sheet metal in place. The RoboCraftsman is agnostic to the make and model of the robots; specific robot selections are made on end-user defined criteria such as load capacity and forming speed.
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