Welcome

Digital fabrication technology has opened up the possibility to fabricate directly from design information, promising to transform many design and production disciplines in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector. However, the unstructured nature of construction poses several technical, social, and economic barriers that hinder the direct adoption and integration of such innovations by the AEC sector and the achievement of the vision of fully automated and robotized building construction. Hence, in this workshop we investigate whether the idea of a hybrid, dually augmented human-robot team could form the basis of a paradigm shift in this field. Human-in-the-loop design and production chains have the potential to exploit machine intelligence and capacities while incorporating the participatory engagement of builders and fabricators.

To push both conceptual and technological boundaries in this domain, this workshop explores the potentials of human-robot collaboration for the in-place assembly of complex building structures. By using a custom-made object-aware mobile AR interface, humans and robots share a digital-physical workspace, in which humans are informed by digital spatial data, and robots are informed vice versa by the information of tracked physical objects for cooperative assembly routines. In doing so, we aim to negotiate the levels of task distribution and coordination, and to reinvent the fundamental relationship between humans – skilled workers and designers – and machines and robots.