Adaptive Assembly: Collaborative Robotic Reuse in Construction

Actar, Energy and sustainability, Essay, Imminent Urban Commons, Jeffrey Anderson, No Density, Ryan Johns, Senseable Technologies, Technology and fabrication

Adaptive reuse, Collaborative work, Computation, Digital fabrication, Digital technologies, Emergent technologies, Essay, Experimental Fabrications, Imminent Commons, Innovation, Interaction, Local materials, Local production, Making, Materials, Production, Production chain, Productivity, Recycling, Research, Responsive technologies, Rethinking Urban Environments, Robotics, Seoul, Seoul Biennale 2017, Software, South Korea, Sustainability, Sustainable construction, Technology, Urban strategy

A new era of automation in which humans and small-scale industrial robots work side-by-side on the same tasks has the potential to bring high-value production back to urban cores. New forms of urban metabolism in which materials are processed, used, and reused in creative ways by both humans and machines are establishing “Making” as a new urban common. This project explores the potential of using robots and computer vision to assemble a structure of irregular parts using a human operator in concert with adaptive assembly algorithms.