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Automatic Robotic Construction for Customizable Rammed Earth Walls
Guanqi Zhu
Digital design consultant, Designer, Researcher
Co-founder, E-LAB, Shenzhen, China
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Queensland, Australia
Guanqi is an Ph.D. Candidate and an active architect. His research field includes digital design, interactive installation, material computation, artificial intelligence and robotic construction. Meanwhile, Guanqi is a computational designer who has provided digital design consulting services to various design institutes and studios, utilizing his skills in algorithm and mathematics logicism to solve practical design problems. Guanqi has received recognition for his work, including a second-place award in the Autodesk Excellence Awards (AEC) building category and a third-prize win in the A8 reconstruction design competition. He was also a participant in the BIENNALE OF URBANISM \ ARCHITECTURE 2017 and exhibited his “Transformable space” project at the Vanke Design Commune in 2018. Furthermore, Guanqi is a National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces winner, having earned first prize and ranking 13th in the province.
Abstract
Earth soil is a highly sustainable naturalistic raw material decomposable with minimum environmental impact and naturally comes with diverse colors and properties. Rammed earth construction has traditionally been conducted as a manual process involving unsaturated loose soil compacted inside a formwork. However, the manual process of rammed earth construction is highly time-consuming and labor-intensive. Significantly, the visual effects on the vertical surface have long been ignored by designers and builders, which fulfills the aesthetic variety of facades. Therefore, this research aims to develop an automatic robotic system capable of constructing rammed walls with a customizable distribution of different soil layers precisely.
In the experiment, the robot arm will move point by point continuously in the formwork according to the pixel of the input image, while simultaneously, the color information will be sent to the end-effector that controls the steppers to extrude earth soil with the corresponding color proportion. An end-effector is designed for the earth material distribution cooperated with a robotic arm. The extrusion system of the end-effector includes three parts: material extrusion, material blender, and material discharge. In the extrusion part, two 57 mm stepper motors connecting with a screw are used to push the earthen material from the cartridges to the mixing tank. The stepper motors’ rotation speed has already been set up according to the flow measurements. Then the material blender begins to stir and mix the extruded earth with different colors in a few seconds. Finally, the blended material drops through the blender tank for further mixing.
Overall, this research developed a comprehensive automatic robotic workflow that bridges the construction process, hardware development, material performance, and aesthetic of the fabricated prototypes with sustainable earth-based materials. The new technologies developed in this research can be expected to apply in real-scale architectural walls or on-site construction projects.
Keywords: Robotic fabrication; Rammed earth construction; Automatic construction; Material research
Host
Wei Wu
Master of Design Studies, Harvard GSD
Wei Wu is a designer and computational artist with a Master’s degree in Design Studies from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She operates at the intersection of design and emerging technologies, producing work that encompasses robotic installations, interactive media art, and extended reality design.
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