Robotic Fabrication
of
Brick Wall

In this project, my role is to fabricate a fundraising brick wall on-site and develop a positioning system that combines the HTC VIVE Tracker and a robotic arm (UR10) within two months.

This project starts with two questions: how to move a robotic system (UR10) on a construction site and how to use it to locate building components in situ

We mounted the robotic arm U10 on a mobile station for on-site access. The pickup location for 20x10x5cm wooden bricks is set at the bottom of the mobile station.

We use the HTC VIVE Tracker positioning system to collect tracking data. Using a technology stack consisting of the modeling software Rhino3D, its development platform Grasshopper, SteamVR, OpenVR, and Python, we created a virtual model of the environment.

VIVE Tracker extracts the relative coordinates of the UR10 and the reference block. We then used this data to simulate the following manufacturing process: 80 to 120 bricks were placed in 1 to 2 hours, during which time the UR10 did not collide. When the robotic arm finishes this area, we move it to the next new position.

During the production process, we moved the robotic arm 22 times to build 24 layers of the wall with 1024 bricks. Due to ceiling height restrictions, the remaining 28 layers of 406 bricks are constructed from prefabricated elements.

This approach provides digital integration and information oversight throughout the design and execution phases of the robotic manufacturing process.