Robotized Additive Manufacturing of Funicular Architectural Geometries Based on Building Materials

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) technology has been identified as one of the major digital innovations that has revolutionized not only the field of the industry but also the construction. From a research side, AM is a multidisciplinary domain, combining between materials science, mechatronics engineering, and architectural design. The AM concept needs to consider the geometry and the shape of printed objects regarding material properties and robot kinematics which are adaptable to the object size. In this article, we present an integrated design and control of an omnidirectional mobile manipulator robot (MMR), capable of extruding concrete and clay materials, to print complex and funicular architectural geometries. The studied robot allows printing building pieces with different shapes and sizes by additive deposit which can later be assembled on-site. The main issue concerns the control of continuous material deposit, with specified accuracy and respecting the desired shape. This problem involves to solve, in real time, the nonlinear kinematic model of a ten-degrees-of-freedom heterogeneous robot. The kinematic model and the control of utilized MMR are discussed, and an optimization method based on quadratic programming is used for handling the robot redundancy. Finally, we present the experimental results to illustrate the efficiency of AM on the developed concept.