In the summer semester of 2025, three students in the master’s seminar “Custom Robot End Effectors” explored how robots can shape, imprint, or move materials using different tools. They learned how to control the UR10 through Grasshopper and, building on that knowledge, developed their own end effectors. At the core of the seminar was the question of how various end effectors define a robot’s interaction with materials. The UR10 may follow precise motion paths, but it is the tool at the end of its arm that ultimately determines whether a material is imprinted, cut, shifted, formed, or painted. The seminar also served as an introduction to robotic fabrication: working on a small scale and with experimental tools, the students gained their first hands-on experience with robot motion, material interaction, and tool design. Although the projects were intentionally kept at a prototype level, they provide architecture students in particular with an understanding of how such processes can later be scaled up. A variety of prototypes were created: a dual-stamp end effector produces complex patterns on paper; a pneumatic silicone soft gripper inflates and grasps objects by compressing its tentacles; a coffee-filled pneumatic jamming gripper stiffens under varying air pressure and can pick up irregular shapes. Even simple passive tools—such as a brush holder or a spatula-like tool—served as early test prototypes to explore the robot’s initial movements.

Here are the students’ results: