Automatic real-world assembly of machine-designed structures

Several approaches have been presented which allow robots to build structures to adapt themselves or their environments. To autonomously build these structures, a design must be made, from which instructions for the fabrication process can be derived. For a constrained fabrication process, e.g. considering the limited range of a robot, this transfer can be cumbersome. We present a local building process based on a sequence of two distinct operations, which implicitly encodes the shape of a structure. Given this encoding, the structure can readily be built with a real-world robotic system. We show automatic design of structures reaching out of the robot´s range and fulfilling stability and strength constraints using an evolutionary design algorithm. The final design can then be built with a robotic arm from wooden cubes and hot melt adhesives. We demonstrate the whole process including the construction of a structure from more than thirty cubes with our real-world setup. We expect that automatic design and construction can further improve the physical adaptability of robotic systems.