Gantry robots and anthropomorphic arms of various sizes have already been studied and, while they are in use in some parts of the world for automated construction, a new kind of wide workspace machinery, cable-driven parallel robots (CDPR), has emerged. These robots are capable of automated movement in a very wide workspace, using cables reeled in and out by winches as actuation members, the other elements being easily stacked for easy relocation and reconfiguration, which is critical for on-site construction. The motivation of this paper is to showcase the potential of a CDPR operating solely on motor position sensors and showing limited collisions from the cables for large-scale applications in the building industry relevant for additive manufacturing, without risk of collisions between the cables and the building. The combination of the Cogiro CDPR (Tecnalia, LIRMM-CNRS 2010) with the extruder and material of the Pylos project (IAAC 2013) opens the opportunity to a 3D printing machine with a workspace of 13.6 9 9.4 9 3.3 m. The design patterns for printing on such a large scale are disclosed, as well as the modifications that were necessary for both the Cogiro robot and Pylos extruder and material. Two prints, with different patterns, have been achieved with the Pylos extruder mounted on Cogiro: the first spanning 3.5 m in length, the second, reaching a height of 0.86 m. Based on this initial experiment, plans for building larger parts and buildings are discussed, as well as other possible applications for CDPRs in construction, such as the manipulation of assembly processes (windows, lintels, beams, floor elements, curtain wall modules, etc.) or brick laying.

In order to use a cable-driven parallel robot to inspect an existing surface, a straightforward solution consists in fixing the robot components on this surface. In most cases, however, there are conditions that limit these fixations, for example structural reasons since the frame of the surface has probably not been specifically calculated to withstand the forces generated by the parallel cable-driven robot. In the particular case of inspection of the façade of a building, civil engineering specifications apply, which may drastically reduce the engineering possibilities from the point of view of the parallel cable-driven robot designers. This paper introduces a detailed example of implementation of a parallel cable-driven robot on the Media-TIC building located in Barcelona in Spain. In this highly technological building, the main façade parallel cable-driven robot in intended to work as a sensor for monitoring the environment, but also as an interface between the building and its occupiers. The various constraints-due to normative, structural and aesthetic reasons-that were tackled are described in the paper, along with the elected detailed design of the robot that complies with these constraints.

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We present a novel overactuated aerial vehicle based on four quadrotors connected to an airframe by means of passive universal joints. The proposed architecture allows to independently control the six degrees of freedom of the airframe without having fixed propellers at inefficient configurations or making use of dedicated rotor tilting actuators. After deriving the dynamic equations that describe its motion, we propose a linear control strategy that is able to successfully decouple rotation and translation, relying exclusively on on-board sensors. A prototype is built and preliminary experimental results demonstrate that the concept is feasible. Video: https://youtu.be/9ASP3FyhCJw.