Robarch 2012

Digital fabrication has been termed the “third industrial revolution”, and is promising to revolutionize many disciplines, including most recently the construction sector. Both academia and industry see immense promise in cementitious materials, which lend themselves well to additive manufacturing techniques for digital fabrication in construction. With this recent trend and high interest in this new research field, the 1st RILEM International Conference on Concrete and Digital Fabrication (Digital Concrete 2018) was organized. Since 2014, ETH Zurich has been host for the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) for Digital Fabrication in Architecture, which is highly interdisciplinary and unique worldwide. In 2018, this NCCR opened the “DFAB House”, which incorporates many digital fabrication principles for architecture. It is also responsible for the 600 m2 Robotic Fabrication Lab and the first robotically built roof in the world. Held in tandem with Rob|Arch 2018, the leading conference for robotics in architecture, RILEM deemed it the right time to combine forces at this new conference, which will be the first large conference to feature the work of the recently created RILEM Technical Committee on Digital Fabrication with Cement-based Materials, among other leaders in this new field worldwide. This conference proceedings brings together papers that take into account the findings in this new area. Papers reflect the varying themes of the conference, including Materials, Processing, Structure, and Applications.

This volume collects about 20 contributions on the topic of robotic construction methods. It is a proceedings volume of the robarch2012 symposium and workshop, which will take place in December 2012 in Vienna. Contributions will explore the current status quo in industry, science and practitioners. The symposium will be held as a biennial event. This book is to be the first of the series, comprising the current status of robotics in architecture, art and design.

This monograph by Florian Röhrbein, Germano Veiga and Ciro Natale is an edited collection of 15 authoritative contributions in the area of robot technology transfer between academia and industry. It comprises three parts on Future Industrial Robotics, Robotic Grasping as well as Human-Centered Robots. The book chapters cover almost all the topics nowadays considered ‘hot’ within the robotics community, from reliable object recognition to dexterous grasping, from speech recognition to intuitive robot programming, from mobile robot navigation to aerial robotics, from safe physical human-robot interaction to body extenders. All contributions stem from the results of ECHORD – the European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development, a large-scale integrating project funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme from 2009 to 2013. ECHORD’s two main pillars were the so-called experiments, 51 small-sized industry-driven research projects and the structured dialog a powerful interaction instrument between the stakeholders. The results described in this volume are expected to shed new light on innovation and technology transfer from academia to industry in the field of robotics.

The book presents the proceedings of Rob/Arch 2016, the third international conference on robotic fabrication in architecture, art, and design. The work contains a wide range of contemporary topics, from methodologies for incorporating dynamic material feedback into existing fabrication processes, to novel interfaces for robotic programming, to new processes for large-scale automated construction. The latent argument behind this research is that the term ‘file-to-factory’ must not be a reductive celebration of expediency but instead a perpetual challenge to increase the quality of feedback between design, matter, and making.

This book comprises a first survey of the Collaborative Research Center SFB-TRR 141 ‘Biological Design and Integrative Structures – Analysis, Simulation and Implementation in Architecture’, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft since October 2014. The SFB-TRR 141 provides a collaborative framework for architects and engineers from the University of Stuttgart, biologists and physicists from the University of Freiburg and geoscientists and evolutionary biologists from the University of Tübingen. The programm is conceptualized as a dialogue between the disciplines and is based on the belief that that biomimetic research has the potential to lead everyone involved to new findings far beyond his individual reach. During the last few decades, computational methods have been introduced into all fields of science and technology. In architecture, they enable the geometric differentiation of building components and allow the fabrication of porous or fibre-based materials with locally adjusted physical and chemical properties. Recent developments in simulation technologies focus on multi-scale models and the interplay of mechanical phenomena at various hierarchical levels. In the natural sciences, a multitude of quantitative methods covering diverse hierarchical levels have been introduced. These advances in computational methods have opened a new era in biomimetics: local differentiation at various scales, the main feature of natural constructions, can for the first time not only be analysed, but to a certain extent also be transferred to building construction. Computational methodologies enable the direct exchange of information between fields of science that, until now, have been widely separated. As a result they lead to a new approach to biomimetic research, which, hopefully, contributes to a more sustainable development in architecture and building construction.

This book reflects and expands on the current trend in the building industry to understand, simulate and ultimately design buildings by taking into consideration the interlinked elements and forces that act on them. This approach overcomes the traditional, exclusive focus on building tasks, while posing new challenges in all areas of the industry from material and structural to the urban scale. Contributions from invited experts, papers and case studies provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of the field, as well as perspectives from related disciplines, such as computer science. The chapter authors were invited speakers at the 5th Symposium "Modelling Behaviour", which took place at the CITA in Copenhagen in September 2015.

This volume collects about 20 contributions on the topic of robotic construction methods. It is a proceedings volume of the robarch2012 symposium and workshop, which will take place in December 2012 in Vienna. Contributions will explore the current status quo in industry, science and practitioners. The symposium will be held as a biennial event. This book is to be the first of the series, comprising the current status of robotics in architecture, art and design.