Building a machine to mimic a robot...

[sdimelow]

Evening all, I've been looking into buying an industrial robot but the cost of software just makes it unfeasible.

I'd really like one to machine large polystyrene sculptural pieces, like in this video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwzwzobO5rs


Do you think it'd be possible to build an upright machine to do a similar thing, albeit with fewer DoF?

I've drawn up this simplistic sketch as a bit of a starting point. Green bit goes up and down, yellow bit left and right and the red bit turns to tip the spindle up and down. And there's a turntable...

The issues I see is rigidity as the X moves to its extent, although it could be lightweight as only going to be cutting poly.



Any help appreciated..

P.S. If anyone knows of any free robot software that'd save me building something 😂