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_DAnd...

- Markus Waibel

• Category

  Science & Technology

[missXspencer1]

its all fun and games until someone loses [control of] A.I.

[keisi2009]

Tetris, anyone?

[justgivemethetruth]

too bad paolo soleri need saw this

[Tainer Waynes]

looks like they're building an obelisk from Dead Space..

[thekingofkings675]

im pretty sure theyre programmed, so people dont actually have to fly them

[zekehooper]

No more than guns have now!

[moniker127]

Why is it that when machines move people get all ridiculous about "oh no, its going to kill us!". You guys know predator drones already exist, right?

[blaxors]

They have implicit memory, which means it's part of their design. I suggest the only way they can achieve some sort of self awareness, is through the processing and storing of explicit memory, and the ability to adjust to all the feedback. Humans are not self aware at birth, but become self aware through years of feedback from the physical world. What do you think?

[G Arjun]

cool.is ther any robots that can think....for example --like a honey bee can find its resource which is used to construct its hive.....its my project.

[EleventhPath]

They are controlled by a set of rules put in place that take effect at different events/occurences. You could say that they think, but only the thoughts 'we' tell them to think; that isn't self-awareness.

[Joseph Perrone]

very well done

[Michael Powell]

Utterly remarkable. As I am an architect who also builds multicopters, I am very impressed. Combine this with 3d printing, and we are in a remarkable age for novel building approaches. Well done.