Designing for Automated Construction

Abstract

The majority of automated construction research and development has been bottom-up, from the constructionrengineer- ing side rather than top-down from the design end. Section 2 of this paper looks at precedents in automated construction research and identifies an apparent gap in design related themes. Section 3 is devoted to the introduction of a research programme which addressed topics related to the conceptual design of robotic systems for construction, and developing overall design principles for top-down architectrdesigner applications. The research included the derivation of simple shape grammars and a simulation research programme for understanding component connections and robotic manipulation, using a model robotic construction system remote controlled over the Internet. Section 4 presents a report of the research carried out according to the programme, and introduces an example concept automated construction system designed according to the principles derived from the investigation outlined in Section 3. q2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.