Construction robotics for designed granular materials: in situ construction with designed granular materials at full architectural scale using a cable-driven parallel robot

Abstract

The article presents a cable-driven parallel robot for the in situ construction with designed granular materials at full architectural scale. Granular materials are defined as high numbers of particles larger than a micrometer, between which only short-range repulsive forces are acting. Therefore, they can have the properties of both a solid and a liquid. These materials are, thus, highly pertinent as construction materials, since they are fully recyclable and reconfigurable. Going even beyond these basic properties, a designed granular material allows to tune its overall characteristics through the design of the individual particle. Granular materials can only be deployed in situ and at full scale. Suitable robotic construction systems need to be developed. Cable-driven parallel robots are defined as robotic systems, in which an "end effector" is operated by a set of cables, which are driven by computer numerically controlled motors. The cables are running through elevated pulleys. A cable-driven parallel robot, thus, allows for a "working space", which covers an entire building site. It is comparatively lightweight and, thus, transportable between different construction sites, it is rapidly deployable, since the entire setup takes one day only, and it is adaptable, since the pulleys can be installed in various geometric configurations. The results of this investigation show that cable-driven parallel robots are suitable as construction systems for the full-scale in situ construction of spatial enclosures with designed granular materials. This opens up a new field of research into the potentials of these full-scale, lightweight, rapidly deployable and adaptable robotic construction systems.

Designing [with] Machines

“…Research projects that deploy nongeneric robots demonstrate that the development of architecture-specific machines can introduce entirely new digital fabrication design spaces far beyond automation of conventional construction tasks. A growing number of computational design researchers have endeavored to explore custom robotic solutions, including climbing (Jokic et al 2014;Kayser et al 2019;Yablonina and Menges 2019b), driving (Werfel, Petersen, and Nagpal 2014), aerial (Augugliaro et al 2014;Wood et al 2019), and cable robots (Dierichs et al 2019), all developed and tailored for the fabrication task. Moreover, the field of architecture-specific robots spans beyond fabrication tasks toward architectural robotics (Gross and Green 2012) wherein the machine itself is the architectural object (Kilian 2018) or part of it (Maierhofer et al 2019), designed to respond and adapt to human input through actuation.…”

Bespoke particle shapes in granular matter

“…In addition, non-convex shapes such as 'Z' [11] can also continuously gain shear strength as strains do not necessarily trigger failure, but rather promote particle rearrangement and further interlocking [12][13][14]. Since the particles used for many of these applications are replicated from a single shape -or a few shapes -, the fabrication processes and disposition of the pieces can be automated for construction in environments of difficult access or that require remote-controlled machinery/robots [15,16].…”