Collective Aerial Additive Manufacturing: Incrementally Built Shell Structure Design

Collective Aerial Additive Manufacturing: Incrementally Built Shell Structure Design
Aerial robot additive manufacturing (AM) offers a means to supplement existing on-site AM approaches that are limited in build envelope and accessibility, to support automated construction in more diverse locations. Aerial AM has been recently demonstrated by the authors using quadcopters to extrude cementitious and foam materials within tolerances sufficient for building construction (Zhang et al. 2022). However, approaches to the distributed control and mission planning of multi-robot manufacturing and corresponding building design solutions that engage with this novel technology still need to be developed. Although AM supports substantial geometric design freedom, there are practical challenges that currently limit on-site AM to vertically orientated geometries that remain stable during incremental manufacture. The installation of roofing or other spanning structures is difficult to accomplish without support scaffolding or supplementary building methods, rendering complete automation of AM buildings impractical, whilst limiting the ability of designs to offer efficient monolithic structural solutions. Funicular shell geometries (Rippmann and Block 2013) offer a materially efficient solution to a monolithic spanning enclosure, however, they typically require scaffolding during construction, rendering them unsuitable for incremental manufacture by a team of robots, unless mid-construction stability challenges are addressed. This paper proposes a multi-agent mission-planning robot control framework and simulation environment for Collective Aerial Additive Manufacturing (Collective AAM) together with an approach to the design of scaffold-free 3D shell geometries suited to Collective AAM’s adaptive and incremental approach to concurrent building. Individual agent and swarm-based vector steering behaviors are evaluated to support future integration with existing AAM manufacturing capabilities recently published in the journal Nature (Zhang et al. 2022).

Stuart-Smith, R., Darekar, D., Danahy, P., Bahadir Kocer, B., Pawar, V., & Kovac, M. “Collective Aerial Additive Manufacturing and Incrementally Built Shell Structure Design”, In M. Akbarzadeh, D. Aviv, H. Jamelle, & R. Stuart-Smith (Eds.), ACADIA 2022: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA): Hybrids and Haecceities (pp. 44–55). IngramSpark, 2023.

The paper is available for download on the Cumincad website here.

The Autonomous Manufacturing Lab (AML) explores the integration of robotic manufacturing and construction within architectural design. The AML aims to reduce the environmental and economic costs of design and production while enhancing their cultural and aesthetic impact. The lab's integrative methods for generative design and manufacturing are developed as semi-autonomous systems, exploring possibilities for artisanal-like craftsmanship to be scaled to large production volumes. This approach provides greater specificity and enhanced aesthetic character in design responses compared to traditional automated methods, whilst also reducing material use and waste within bespoke design and production processes. The AML's research enhances design and production capabilities across diverse manufacturing methods and materials by developing industrial and mobile robot fabrication techniques, multi-agent systems, AI/machine learning computational approaches, and applications of real-time sensor and computer vision technologies. This multidisciplinary research includes the development of Aerial Additive Manufacturing, recently published in Nature, which demonstrates the world’s first in-flight additive manufacturing by cooperating drones, representing a rapidly deployable form of collective robotic construction.

University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design
The Weitzman School of Design prepares students to address complex sociocultural and environmental issues through thoughtful inquiry, creative expression, and innovation. As a diverse community of scholars and practitioners, we are committed to advancing the public good–both locally and globally–through art, design, planning, and preservation.

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Collective Aerial Additive Manufacturing: Incrementally Built Shell Structure Design

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