Using Quadrotors to Assemble a Building

A clever idea, first reported by Gareth a couple years ago: Architects are trying to figure out how to use quadrotors to haul and place individual bricks. The above link is in French; here’s a Google translation.

In 2011, Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea launched a pioneering project around training dynamic and robotic procedures applied to architecture. Belonging to the younger generation of architects exploiting the digital tools in the architectural design and construction, Gramazio & Kohler join the engineer Raffaello D’Andrea, whose work concerns the study of algorithms and development of systems autonomous innovation. Together, they hired Flight Assembled Architecture, an architectural research on the potential of a revolutionary assembly tool, revealing joint spatial and material previously unpublished.

Flight Assembled Architecture is the first installation entirely by flying robots. Designed as an architectural structure on the scale of a “vertical village” of 600 meters, Assembled Architecture Flight testing a new paradigm of design and manufacturing, through a physical process of automated dynamic training. This project builds on the simultaneous use of multiple mobile agents. Considered as tools for adaptive production, these flying robots are programmed to interact and to capture, transport and assemble the modules to build architectural structures. They synthesize and the pragmatism of Gramazio & Kohler Architecture and visionary approach to Raffaello D’Andrea in engineering dynamics. The FRAC Centre supports this new project, which will then in its collections devoted to experimental architecture. This collaborative project will be exposed only to the FRAC Centre in Orléans.

After an initial phase of several days devoted to assembly and assembly by robots flying a model of 6 m high and 3.5 m in diameter – made of polystyrene foam modules 1500 prefabricated – the exhibition will the “megastructure” in its final form, and a film performance and restoring the entire design process.

[Via BLDBLOG]