Flying Rotocopter w/ a styrofoam block attached underneath.

Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything eh? Shame. Anyways, happy new year to all – now let’s get onto the nerding…

NPR had a great story some time back about flying robots building a tower in Paris. Using flying rotocopters w/ suction cups attached to them, engineers were able to program the construction of a tower 20 feet high. Along w/ faster construction possibilities, using robots also allows more creative possibilities and greater control in construction, architecture, and design of all levels.

The robots steadily took foam bricks and stacked them into a design set up by two architects. It took a few days to get it altogether, but there were no major casualties or issues w/ the robots. When they were out of power, they automatically went to a nearby charging station and powered themselves back up. While a unit was out of commission, the remaining rotocopters continued to work w/o interruption to complete the task.

Video of the skyscraper being built is shown below.

This first example of automated construction has spawned countless ideas for new buildings; structures, and monuments of different shape/style/capabilities, and researchers in South Korea have taken it one step further beyond this to expand the possibilities of what these automated builders can do.

Radical designs and new methods of construction include proposing robotic flying bees that would secrete an “augmented synthetic material” that could conduct electricity, insulate a building, provide structural support, and much more. Some of the images for these concepts are shown below…

SMART Bee concept rendering

SMART Skyscraper rendering

More discussion about the future possibilities of harnessing this “flying robotic construction cloud” are discussed at BLDGBLOG, including the ethics involved, as well as practical implications of where investment will come from, along w/ some other outlandish speculations of where the technology. Naturally, allusions are made to Skynet and eventually, the idea of robots constructing facilities to build even more advanced robots, etc. Regardless of what’s said, this field is going to be terribly interesting in the near future as we will see radical changes in building designs to reflect this new paradigm of automated construction.