Flying Robot Construction Workers

Back in 1930 when the United States most iconic sky scraper, The Empire State Building, was constructed it required the labor of 3,400 human beings lifting, pulling, welding, riveting, shoveling and pounding. On day in the rapidly approaching future it may well take just as many workers, but workers neither human, nor confined to scaffolding.

The robot workers here at the Flight Constructed Architecture installation ad the FRAC Center in Orleans France are quadrotor helicopters (helicopters with 4 blades and no tail) that a re guided by a master computer console. They land on and grab a brick, then fly up and place it on the structure with glue, and fly back for another brick. When they get tired they land on a charging pad and get more power.

If you have $299 Lying around you can snag the Parrot AR.Drone Quadricopter Controlled by iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, and Android Devices.

Here’s another project that uses quadrotor robots to build structures. This time the flying robots have a claw to grasp magnetic beams and place them on the nacent structure.

-Mike

More Info:

D’Andrea tells me they’re using four flying robots at the same time. First, the robots grab foam bricks from a special brick dispenser on the ground. Next the quadcopters receive the exact coordinates of where the bricks should go based on a detailed digital blueprint of the tower, then they fly off. (ieee Spectrum)

The first use of the Flying Machine Enabled Construction paradigm is the installation titled “Flight Assembled Architecture” at the FRAC Centre, Orleans. This installation was developed jointly with architects Gramazio & Kohler. Flight Assembled Architecture is the first installation to be built by flying machines. Conceived as an architectural structure at a scale of a 600 m high “vertical village”, the installation addresses radical new ways of thinking and materializing architecture as a physical process of dynamic formation. (Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control)

This technology begs a series of questions, of course, including who might first pick up on and directly invest in this construction process (the field exploration wings of transnational oil-services firms? forward-operating base commanders of the 22nd-century U.S. military? rogue GSD students self-supported by a family trust fund?), what sorts of architectural styles might result given the technical and material limitations associated with magnetic cloud-construction (a return to the minimalist grid? Sol Lewitt as architectural progenitor?), and how successfully this could be scaled up to the dimensions of whole towns and cities. (BLDG BLOG)

Sources:

• Flying Robots Build a Tower Near Paris: Krulwich Wonders
• ieee Spectrum
• Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control
• BLDGBLOG
• io9
• The Empire State Building: Wikipedia