Robotic embankment

Abstract

Automating earth-moving tasks has the potential to resolve labour-shortage, allow for unseen designs and foster sustainability through using on-site materials. In this interdisciplinary project involving robotics and landscape architecture, we combine our previous work on autonomous excavation of free-form shapes, dynamic landscape design and terrain modelling tools into a robotic landscape system. It tightly connects survey, design and fabrication to exchange information in real-time during fabrication. We purposely built a LiDAR survey drone for tight integration. The design environment contains terrain modelling tools to balance cut and fill volumes for material-neutral, on-site construction. Its parametric nature allows it to adapt the geometry to changing site conditions during fabrication. Our autonomous walking excavator is used to create these free-form shapes in natural granular material. We propose an excavation planner for free-form embankments that computes the next excavation location and subsequently the location where the excavated soil should be dumped. This robotic excavation system achieves the world’s first autonomous completion of free-form embankments with high accuracy. A $$20\hbox { m}$$ 20 m long S-shaped and a two-faced embankment with a corner with roughly 0.03–0.05 m average error were created.