Robotic construction

When you live on the Moon, your only option for commuting back to Earth or on to Mars will be some kind of rocket. But each launch will kick up a hellstorm of debris. Building walls to contain the mess could be a perfect job for autonomous rovers.

A new materials technique that takes cues from Grandma's yarn bag and cutting-edge tech has the potential to automatically build whole furniture sets – and the fabric that covers them. Then, they can be unraveled to use again in a totally different way.

A robotic truck equipped with a mighty telescopic boom arm has just journeyed from Australia to Florida. Now the construction robot will get busy churning out up to 10 houses in a bid to become the employee of choice for building entire communities.

Scientists have already made edible robotic components. The next challenge is integrating them together to create an entire robot snack that could be used in a wide range of applications, from delivering healthcare to monitoring the environment.

To build or maintain today's colossal wind turbine towers, you either need an absolute monster of a crane – or something like this. The KoalaLifter self-climbing crane is quick, compact, handles heavy loads and creeps up turbine towers of any height.

The extraordinary Hadrian X bricklaying robot rocks up to a building site looking like a regular truck, then extends a 32-m (105-ft) boom arm and starts precisely laying up to 300 large masonry blocks an hour. It's pretty remarkable to watch.

If you were building a wooden structure by hand, it would be hard to lift the wooden components, place them in alignment, then keep them aligned as they were glued together. That's why a Swiss team is using robots to shoulder much of the workload.

Back in 2015 we looked at an interesting approach to automated construction in the form of a brick-laying robot, which has just recorded a new record brick-laying speed said to make it commercially competitive with manual workers around the globe.

A team of post-graduate students from London's Bartlett School of Architecture’s Design Computation Lab has created a modular home office to promote its automated architecture project, which involves the use of robotic fabrication.

Scientists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated an octocopter equipped with a nail gun and a knack for fixing asphalt shingles to a mock rooftop.

​We are starting to see some exciting possibilities in the field of robotic construction, and how it might not just take some of the load off human hands but give rise to an entirely new branch of architecture. The Fiberbots recently developed at MIT are one impressive example of this.