Science Daily September 21, 2022
An international team of researchers (UK, Germany, USA – University of Pennsylvania, Switzerland) introduced aerial additive manufacturing (Aerial-AM) that utilizes a team of aerial robots inspired by natural builders such as wasps. They developed a scalable multi-robot 3D printing and path-planning framework that enabled robot tasks and population size to be adapted to variations in print geometry throughout a building mission. To validate Aerial-AM they developed BuilDrones for depositing materials during flight and ScanDrones for measuring the print quality and integrated a generic real-time model-predictive-control scheme with the Aerial-AM robots. The manufacturing accuracy was five millimetres for printing geometry with precise trajectory requirements. As a proof of concept, they printed/built a cylinder 2.05 metres high consisting of 72 layers of a rapid-curing insulation foam material and a cylinder 0.18 metres high consisting of 28 layers of structural pseudoplastic cementitious material. Aerial-AM allows manufacturing in-flight and offers future possibilities for building in unbounded, at-height or hard-to-access locations…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Additive manufacturing in the building industry. Credit: Nature, volume 609, pages709–717 (2022)Â