Aerial AM Tower

Aerial AM Tower
Aerial Additive Manufacturing (Aerial AM)

The construction industry is adopting additive manufacturing (AM) technologies for onsite construction due to their ability to reduce the time and cost of building. On-site AM typically involves the continuous extrusion of horizontal layers of material using a gantry, larger than the build volume, to move a single extruder mechanism. Transporting and installing such gantry systems limits AM to easily accessible sites. In contrast, Aerial AM, enables swarm-based, parallel manufacturing in remote, or hard-to-access locations, providing greater flexibility and boundless manufacturing. Having recently published in Nature a demonstration of the world’s first Aerial AM with cementitious and composite materials in-flight, Aerial AM Tower is a speculative project that explores the potential of an aerial additively manufactured architecture of near-infinite height. The project’s structural concept (Anders et al. 2019), together with the logistical and aesthetic possibilities of an unbounded swarm-constructed architecture are based on research proofs of concept (Zhang et al, 2022; Stuart-Smith et al, 2023). A custom algorithm produces a structurally efficient concrete tower geometry of 2km in height, whose topological complexity and inclination would be infeasible to construct by traditional building or gantry-based AM approaches. Unbounded, Aerial AM is theoretically able to construct the tower as a filagree exoskeleton, partially designed through the act of construction without support scaffolds. A simulated swarm of aerial robots collectively builds, self-organizing as they move upwards along the surface of a virtual model of the tower. The intricate geometry of the exoskeleton arises from aerial robot agent-to-agent local interactions, resulting in an emergent exoskeleton formation that is intrinsic to the structural geometry of the tower and the act of aerial swarm construction.

Lead Researcher: Robert Stuart-Smith
Lead Collaborators: Chris Williams (Uni Bath), Paul Shepherd (Uni Bath), Vijay Pawar (UCL), Mirko Kovac (Imperial College / Empa)
Researchers: Andrew Homick Patrick Danahy

Associated Research Papers:

Ander, M., P. Shepard, R.Stuart-Smith, and C.Williams. “A building of unlimited height”. In Proceedings of the IASS Annual Symposium 2019 - Structural Membranes 2019: Form and Force, edited by C. Lázaro, K.-U. Bletzinger, and E. Onate (Eds.), International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), Barcelona, 2019, 1426-1433

Stuart-Smith, R., D. Darekar, P. Danahy, B. Bahadir Kocer, V. Pawar, and M. Kovac. “Collective Aerial Additive Manufacturing.” In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), edited by M. Akbarzadeh, D. Aviv, H. Jamelle, and R. Stuart-Smith, 44-55. La Vergne: IngramSpark, 2023.

Stuart-Smith, R., M. Kovac, V. Pawar, C. Williams, and P. Shepard. “Aerial Additive Manufacturing” (Aerial AM). In Time, Space, Existence: Venice 2023 Architecture Biennial, edited by European Cultural Centre Team, 474-475. Amsterdam: European Cultural Centre, 2023.

Zhang, K., P. Chermprayong, F. Xiao, D. Tzoumanikas, B. Dams, S. Kay, B.B. Kocer, A. Burns, L. Orr, T. Alhinai, C. Choi, D.D. Darekar, W. Li, S. Hirschmann, V. Soana, S.A. Ngah, C. Grillot, S. Sareh, A. Choubey, R. Stuart-Smith and M. Kovac, et al. “Aerial Additive Manufacturing with Multiple Autonomous Robots.” Nature 609, no. 7928, 2022: 709-717. DOI. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04988-4.