Robotic construction

Comprehensive approach to the robotic construction: Drones and robotic arms in the building construction Industries

This research aims at focusing on the use of robotic construction, namely drones and robotic arms, in the building construction industry. Contrarily to other industries, the building construction industry is still far away from a level of automatization that enables the construction of end product more efficiently.

Robot arms in architecture industry are used mainly to digitally fabricate by subtracting but there are some experiences worldwide using them for the assembly of construction elements. This use for assembling construction elements is rare and is limited to experiments carried out at university level, which have been applied on few occasions in practice. The use of drones in the construction sector has increased considerably in recent years, mainly due to its use for 3D scanning and photogrammetry. In these cases drones serve to fly over the areas that will have an intervention and carry cameras, video cameras or sensors in order to collect data from the sites. The use of drones to assist the assembly of components of the construction has a much smaller advance than the similar one with robotic arms and is limited to a few experiments carried out by universities, which seek to explore how this technology can be used to build buildings. Experiments undertaken at ETH Zurich by the team of Gramazio Koehler Architects as “Flight Assembled Architecture” and “The Aerial Construction” with drones and with robotic arms the “The informed Wall” also by Gramazio Koehler and the “On the Bri-n-ck” by Ingeborg M. Rocker from Harvard University are very good examples of the use of such technologies.

Three goals are envisage for this research: i) Revise and synthesize the ways robotic construction is influencing architecture design in the last years and devise perspectives about its use in the future decades; ii) Define the group of situations for which robotic construction with drones and robotic arms can bring advantages for architecture; iii) Develop a methodology for the construction of pre-made elements in controlled environments by the use of robotic technologies.

Pedro Sebastião (IT-IUL)

Instituto de Telecomunicações IT-IUL