Collective Aerial Additive Manufacturing

Robert Stuart-Smith, Durgesh Darekar, Patrick Danahy, Basaran Bahadir Kocer, Vijay Pawar, Mirko Kovac

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference Contribution (Conference Proceeding)

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Aerial robot additive manufacturing (AM) offers a means to supplement existing on-site AM approaches that are limited in build envelope and accessibility, to support automated construction in more diverse locations. Aerial AM has been recently demonstrated by the authors using quadcopters to extrude cementitious and foam materials within tolerances sufficient for building construction (Zhang et al. 2022). However, approaches to the distributed control and mission planning of multi-robot manufacturing and corresponding building design solutions that engage with this novel technology still need to be developed. Although AM supports substantial geometric design freedom, there are practical challenges that currently limit on-site AM to vertically orientated geometries that remain stable during incremental manufacture. The installation of roofing or other spanning structures is difficult to accomplish without support scaffolding or supplementary building methods, rendering complete automation of AM buildings impractical, whilst limiting the ability of designs to offer efficient monolithic structural solutions. Funicular shell geometries (Rippmann and Block 2013) offer a materially efficient solution to a monolithic spanning enclosure, however, they typically require scaffolding during construction, rendering them unsuitable for incremental manufacture by a team of robots, unless mid-construction stability challenges are addressed. This paper proposes a multi-agent mission-planning robot control framework and simulation environment for Collective Aerial Additive Manufacturing (Collective AAM) together with an approach to the design of scaffold-free 3D shell geometries suited to Collective AAM’s adaptive and incremental approach to concurrent building. Individual agent and swarm-based vector steering behaviors are evaluated to support future integration with existing AAM manufacturing capabilities recently published in the journal Nature (Zhang et al. 2022).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHybrids and Haecceities - Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, ACADIA 2022
EditorsMasoud Akbarzadeh, Dorit Aviv, Hina Jamelle, Robert Stuart-Smith
PublisherACADIA
Pages44-55
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)979-898608058-1
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event42nd Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, ACADIA 2022 - Philadelphia, United States
Duration: 27 Oct 202229 Oct 2022

Publication series

NameHybrids and Haecceities - Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, ACADIA 2022

Conference

Conference42nd Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, ACADIA 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPhiladelphia
Period27/10/2229/10/22

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was undertaken in the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab at both the University of Pennsylvania (Architecture) and University College London (Computer Science), and in the Aerial Robotics Lab at Imperial College. The research is also supported by EPSRC funding EP/N018494/1 & EP/S031464/1. Mirko Kovac was also supported by a Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Hybrids and Haecceities - Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, ACADIA 2022. All rights reserved.

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