Complementing to the prior experimentations in previous months on man-machine interaction and handling of material tolerances, current stage of the project focuses on the proof of the concept of mobility.

A system is developed for self-positioning of the mobile unit through the 3D scanning of a local reference. In the demonstration, an 8-meter long modular wall is assembled by 13 consecutive self-positioning of the mobile fabrication unit in an unknown environment (Fig 1). Next stage of the project involves an integration of the 3 objectives; being mobility, man-machine interaction and handling of material tolerances.

The demonstration that took place in the last month was the pioneering experimentation on putting the mobile fabrication unit in its context – on the construction site. The context is chosen as the parking space of ETH Zurich with a ceiling height of 2.50 m. It is the pioneering demonstration for building a large building element on-site.

Initial Tests on Relocation (proof of concept with 3 consecutive moves)

Prior to the fabrication of the fragile structure (the wall) in the parking space, a small scale demonstration took place for proving the concept of mobility according to a local reference system.

In this system, the 3D scanner which was implemented on the robot is used to self-position the mobile unit. The scanning mechanism finds the center point of the metal disk and this point is set as the origin of the plane (coordinate system) that is defined in the CAD model for each new position.  

Real-World Conditions

The data from the CAD model of the structure is imported to the robot controller using the system developed on the software side. The wall, the fragile structure, is designed and partitioned according to the simulation studies done with offline programming for finding out the most feasible positioning of the fabrication unit.

The whole design complexity of the structure arises from the superposition of algorithmic rules with cannot be applied easily in a manual fabrication process. Several aspects of the design is driven by the robotic fabrication method chosen.

Fig. 1: The fragile structure: A modular, robotically fabricated 8-meter long wall.