Imagine walking past a bustling construction site,
and instead of workers with construction hats
pouring cement and tying rebar,
it’s teeming with robots.
Hundreds of transport bots delivering materials,
aerial drones hoisting beams,
and autonomous bots stacking bricks.
It might sound like science fiction,
but for researchers involved in the emerging field
of collective robotic construction, it’s a real possibility.
And perhaps a necessity.
The world’s population is on the rise and so is the
demand for housing, especially in urban areas.
54% of people today live in urban areas,
a number expected to jump to 66%, by 2050.
And meeting this housing demand has a human cost -
20% of all work-related injuries every year
in the U.S. occur on construction sites.
Researchers believe that in the coming decades,
collective robotic construction will be able to step in
to meet the increasing demand for housing, while at the
same time keeping human workers out of harm’s way.
And as humanity expands its reach
out into the solar system,
robotic construction could play a criticl part
in building habitats for humans
in extraterrestrial environments.
One big question in collective robotic construction
is how will the bots work together?
Will they behave more like animals or people?
In nature, collective construction is used
for building nests, dams, even bridges.
Termites construct and maintain nests built
entirely out of their own feces,
laced with pheromones,
One termite leaves a pheromone in the wall—
when another termite smells that special smell,
it adds more wall, and its own pheromone trace.
This feedback loop encourages higher and higher builds.
These robots act much in the same way--
detecting each other's work and building upon it--
but no need for feces and pheromones.
and these bots communicate with each other
to construct a model building, determining both
their current status and the next step
in the construction sequence.
These robots specialize in coordinating
in air and on land.
The arms stay in place while the drone
weaves back and forth.
On-board sensors let the arms and drones
communicate next steps and hand off the fibers.
This robot is inspired by beavers’ ability
to repair their own dams.
It makes decisions about changing
its environment all on its own.
Here, it builds itself a ramp in a simulated disaster zone
full of rubble.
The termite- or beaver-like builder bots
have a few built-in instructions but no central
controller guiding them step-by- step.
In the human world, there’s usually a person in charge,
overseeing shipments, worker safety, and schedules.
Centralized approaches to collective construction
are also being developed, which would rely
on a central controller orchestrating everything
in real time: issuing orders to worker bots
and planning all motion paths to avoid collisions.
Or a worked out plan,
issued to the whole robotic team all at once.
Even on a nano-scale,
sometimes there needs to be a plan.
These agile self-assembling nanobots
zipping back and forth are all operated using
a central controller which supplies the robots
with exact instructions.
Would you use a robot to build a beaver dam?
Well, it might be good practice for the bots.
The types of structures that robots will be building
in the future might look very different
from today’s buildings.
Just like human architects and designers,
plans designed to be robot-built will have
to consider the building’s function
and comfortable human occupancy,
but the types of building techniques they can access
will differ and incorporate
other kinds of efficiencies.
Computer simulations like these
are already being used to determine the most efficient
ways to build structures with bots.
These simulations can be used to issue instructions
to robots like these from earlier, which are
able to carry, climb, and stack panels
to build a simple structure.
The robot-constructed buildings of the future
might not only have unique forms, they may
also be made of very different materials.
Future robotic construction crews could
fabricate buildings using locally sourced materials,
mined or spun, and then build based
on the parameters of the available materials
and the lay of the land.
Or the structures could adapt continuously.
Like in this example, a sun shade made of
prefabricated panels and aerial drones that
changes shape throughout the day.
These robotic lattice structures have plants
growing in between the braids.
In the future, with the help of genetic engineering,
the leaves could act as sensors to alert us
to toxins in our environment.
While the current technology is definitely impressive,
there is still a long way to go
before our cityscapes are bot-built.
There are still significant strides to be made
in robot autonomy, perception, and design.
There’s also the question of what level
of interaction will humans have with robots
in an automated construction environment.
And how will humanity adapt to the economic
impact of thousands of construction jobs lost
to robot labor?
That being said, collective robotic construction
has the potential to change the way humans
approach building forever.
Advances in learning algorithms and smart building
materials could allow us to tailor structures
to their environments, minimizing local impact.
Take building a dam, for example,
which usually entails surveying the land,
a massive excavation phase,
and then an equally massive construction phase.
Using robots, all of these steps can be done at once.
Worker bots could survey the site,
excavate and pour concrete, all simultaneously,
leaving a minimal environmental footprint,
at a much faster pace.
And we can’t forget about the final frontier -
robots could be used to build habitats in
extraterrestrial environments, deployed years ahead
of a crewed mission to, say, Mars, to
construct living quarters using the Martian soil
surrounding the landing site.
The possibilities are limited only
by our own imaginations -
maybe the robots of the future
won’t dream of just electric sheep,
but concrete & rebar as well.
