Robotic construction

Robotics

Hadrian X brick-laying robot ups the ante to 200 blocks an hour

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.

The system is based on a single, repeating building block, which is prefabricated using CNC technology and robotic assembly by two industrial robots

Architecture

Pop-up office, studio or cafe built with blocks fabricated by robots

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.

Where a human roofer would need to pull the trigger on the electric nail gun, the team programmed a virtual switch so that the drone itself does so when in the correct position

Drones

Autonomous roofing drone nails down asphalt shingles

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.

A human controller sets some basic design parameters pertaining to how they want the finished structure to look, and MIT's FIberbots do the rest

Architecture

MIT's Fiberbots form skinny self-styled towers from the ground up

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.