Abstract The advancement of industrial robot technology has opened up a new direction for stone sculpture machining. However, whether through traditional hand carving or modern industrial robotic grinding, a significant amount of natural stone must be removed, typically in the form of stone powder. This process not only decreases machining efficiency but also results in the wastage of stone resources due to the generation of stone powder, which can negatively impact the ecological environment. In order to enhance the efficiency of stone sculpture machining while reducing natural stone waste and environmental pollution, a method for the efficient and green sawing of natural stone sculptures using industrial robots is proposed. First, based on the processing characteristics of diamond wire saw, a mathematical model is developed for the ruled surface generated by the saw's movement and its corresponding compensated surface. Second, with the contour curve of the model as the directrix, an enveloping ruled surface is generated. Next, the minimum volume ruled surface model is generated by Boolean operation using the enveloping ruled surface and the model bounding box. Then, the contour curve corresponding to the minimum volume ruled surface model (the directrix of the envelope ruled surface) is utilized as the machining path for an integrated robotic diamond wire cutting system. A ruled surface model of Stanford Bunny was obtained by sawing a marble block using the robotic diamond wire cutting system. The experimental results show that the material removal rate of the robotic diamond wire cutting is 1.37 times that of saw blade cutting and 2.30 times that of grinding. The volume of stone powder generated during the processing was 0.16 × 10⁷mm³, accounting for only 1.47% of the total stone powder produced during the grinding process. In summary, the proposed method not only enhances processing efficiency but also reduces natural stone waste and mitigates environmental pollution.