MArch Year 5 Thesis The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Ivo Tedbury SEMBLR Construction Platform – using opensource RobOBIM as a development framework to facilitate and safeguard the automation of building construction Thesis Tutor: Oliver Wilton The use of robots to construct buildings and other structures has the potential to lead to shared prosperity, if the technology is developed through a suitable platform. This could be enabled by an open-source syntax, common to both robotic systems and the design of the assembled product: Robot-oriented Building Information Modelling (RobOBIM). This design research, developing and testing the SEMBLR system, addresses both technical and social-political considerations and seeks to investigate the feasibility of the RobOBIM approach. For automated robotic assembly of building-scale structures, a relative robot system (where the robot moves relative to the object it is assembling) has the key advantage of circumventing external infrastructure constraints to allow unlimited form and size. For the SEMBLR system, aggregations of composite timber ‘bricks’ are both the desired construction objective and the assembler robot’s locomotion infrastructure. An unconventional design approach is needed, given that ‘these robots, plus the materials they assemble, are best viewed as a combined system’1. To this end, SEMBLR uses a single syntax, which augments traditional Building Information 334
Modelling (BIM) to include the integration of robotic assembly systems. The proposed system is developed and tested physically at 1:1 scale using a bespoke end-effector mounted on an industrial robot, and digitally using custom robot simulation scripts. This field of investigation links to the ever-evolving labour movement – robots could build normal structures without the need for human labour or vast capital expenditure. Making construction labour unnecessary could be good for humanity, but the required tools must be developed from within our existing capitalist society in such a way that the citizens retain the right to choose how they are used. Thus, a sociopolitical conceptual framework is proposed, outlining how automated construction systems could be developed and implemented to socially progressive effect, addressing matters including open intellectual property, distributed production, environmental sustainability, public ownership, a collaborative platform and phased system development. Overall, the research anticipates a new field of technical exploration, entwined with an evolving sociopolitical outlook for the emerging design and building processes. 1. Gershenfeld, N. et al. (2015). Macrofabrication with Digital Materials: Robotic Assembly. Architectural Design, 85(5), pp. 122-127. Image: Five SEMBLR bricks, reversibly assembled using a custom end-effector and industrial robot, driven by RobOBIM data-structure of the bricks.