ROBOTIC LANDSCAPES — NATURE, COMPUTATION, AND THE DESIGN SPACE OF AUTONOMOUS TERRAIN MODELING

Abstract

An experimental studio on a highway site in Canton of Ticino in Switzerland held at the ETH in the fall of 2017 is the result of a collaborative project with the National Center of Competence in Research Digital Fabrication, ETH Zürich. The work shows a series of designs that were developed through procedural and robotic principles. The landscape models based on a Lidar point cloud data set of the entire Ticino Valley served as the basis of all terrain operations. The results obtained after a 15-week studio are encouraging and show the way towards a new way of conceiving landscapes through robotic design.