This definitely counts as more sci-fi than practical reality, but a South Korean team has proposed using a cloud of "robotic bees" to squirt building material to form structures the way bees make nests.
Writing in eVolo, an architecture magazine, Danielle Del Sol says, "These bees aren't interested in honey: these workers will actually build a structure. Each robot is capable of using cartridges filled with agents that enable them to construct literal physical material, which the designers dub "augmented synthetic material."
eVolo then offers this fanciful vision of a robotic bee:
They were inspired by the now-famous French demonstration of a quadcopter-built tower:
Comments
Damn right, as others point out, high precision outdoor navigation is definitely within the realm of current sensors. DGPS for one, down to +- 1 cm. Getting it below that should be an interesting nav problem but definitely doable.
ian "nav guy"
If there is a system as precise as a Vicon working outdoors please point me to that, I will buy :-) Additionally the amount of hardware for the "towers" and calibration could be time consuming..
DGPS takes one case and 5-10min. of initialisation. Vision is for the final approach.
It´s definetely one of the interesting topics at the moment. Think about flying close to or under structures. GPS could be bad there. Laser scanning or tracking become interesting then... Too bad all the systems are way beyond hobby price ranges at the moment. We need the "Kinect for outdoor"!! :-)
Wouldn't it be easier to use a local version of GPS via towers instead of DGPS and vision? It just seems that way to me , but of course such systems are also expensive.
It´s 3D printig thought big, why not :-)
Chris, positioning is less a problem than most people think. Still challenging but doable by a combination of vision and DGPS. Have done it and you get some mm accuracy...
> They were inspired by the now-famous French demonstration of a quadcopter-built tower:
French? You probably mean Swiss...
John: Sure, in sci-fi fantasy land that's totally doable ;-)
Exactly how the robotic bees are supposed to find the exact right coordinates when they're not in a Vicon motion capture room like the ETH demo is not explained. Unless they're happy to have the building built to GPS accuracy, which will make it look like one of the house of blocks my three year old assembles.
I was wondering how they were going to keep the bricks from being blown off. Looks like they decided to spray glue. That means they will only get one shot at installing each brick correctly.
This concept reminds me of Michael Crichton's book Prey. In that case it was cloud of nano particles, or maybe MEMS, working in unison, but basically the same idea (I am so tempted to write more of a spoiler, but I'll hold off in case someone is inspired to read the book now).