Robotically Driven Construction of Buildings
Year: 2014-2015
Project leader: Henriette Bier
Project team: Henriette Bier, Sina Mostafavi, Ana Anton, Serban Bodea
Collaborators / Partners: 3TU Bouw, TUE, Delft Robotics Institute (DRI), ABB
Funding: 50K
Robotically Driven Construction of Buildings (RDCB) is an exploration into holistic/integral design to production solutions for robotically driven construction of buildings by involving the disciplines of architecture, robotics, materials science, construction and building technology, and structural design. The team integrates knowledge from the individual disciplines in order to develop new numerically controlled manufacturing techniques and building-design optimizations for adding creative values to buildings in a cost-effective and sustainable way.
This project is in line with Europe’s aims for improving material sustainability and energy efficiency of buildings and construction processes. Robotically driven construction and customized building material systems have the potential to realize this in a cost-effective way and at the same time reduce accidents and health hazards for workers in the building sector. In order to achieve this RDCB is distributing materials as needed and where needed. This requires exploration of a variety of techniques and implies working with customized materials while finding the best methods of applying materials in the logic of for example specific force flows or thermal dissipation patterns.
RDCB advances multi- and trans-disciplinary knowledge in robotically driven construction by designing and engineering a new building system for the on-demand production of customizable building components. The main consideration is that in architecture and building construction the factory of the future employs building materials and components that can be on site robotically processed and assembled.
At the Delft University of Technology (TUD) two groups of researchers and students have explored possibilities of implementation of robotics in architectural design and building material systems. While at the Civil Engineering Department the focus was to study the production of suitable recycled fine aggregates to be used in robotically aided construction processes, for the Hyperbody group at the faculty of architecture at TU Delft, the focus was on developing a robotic setup as an integrated design to production system for Additive Manufacturing supported by customized Computer Aided Design procedures.
Exploring holistic/integral solutions for robotically driven construction of buildings; Delft University of Technology & Eindhoven University of Technology + Mebin