Robotic construction

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.