Flight Assembled Architecture

Yesterday night the first installation to be built by flying machines opened its doors to the public. An hour or so after the Opening, after most of the crowd had gone to drink champagne in the building next door, I snuck upstairs and recorded a few short clips of the quadrocopters.

The installation, called "Flight Assembled Architecture", was conceived and built by teams led by my colleagues Fabio Gramazio & Matthias Kohler as well as Raffaello D'Andrea at the ETH Zurich. It illustrates a radically new way of thinking about materializing architecture: Use a multitude of mobile flying agents working in parallel and acting together as a scalable production means. As you can see in the video, the quadrocopters are programmed to interact, lift, transport and assemble small modules in order to erect a building.

The tower is actually a 1:100 model of a "vertical village" with a height of 600 meters and housing 30'000 inhabitants. To learn more about the technology (control architecture, collision avoidance and freeway based flight, prick placement, safety systems, etc.) and architectural aspects (geographic location, transit times, access plans, structural and wind tunnel analysis, etc.), have a look at http://www.idsc.ethz.ch/Research_DAndrea/fmec

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• flying
• machine
• arena
• ethz
• eth
• zurich
• quadrotor
• quadrocopter
• quadcopter
• robotics

[Partof300]

By the end of the year they'll be building a wall with our bodies.

[kubik4ever1]

Habrahabr.ru

[mangusrah]

Well, we had a good run.

[UserHuge]

Then the wind comes up...

[TheAbyrvalg666]

Thanks goodness, the end of fucking humans is getting closer! :)

[strixcz]

@mychannelvic There's a lot of laser sensors/cameras all around the room. It'll take some time to make those things operational outside... But I guess one of the easiest way in a near future would be using a "career" (no Starcraft pun intended =D) to watch over them so their flight position would be always relative to the "queen". Creepy stuff though... =/

[life42theuniverse]

I would be more concerned about loss of jobs

[ElHasZardo]

@Partof300 not much truth in hollywood

[WirelessTortureDevi]

Engineers are smart. I wonder what other kinds of wireless stuff they could possibly come up with. Maybe something to help future victims like myself. Please watch my videos they are no joke. Some creepers have engineered a death machine. I am not joking it is more terrible than terrorists themselves.

[Drrck11]

It looks amazing, but honestly, if I were a construction worker, I'd feel a little uncomfortable with that flying over my head.

[cavon28]

Has no one seen terminator or the matrix! jesus chrsit, run for your lives!