Adalberto de Paula
Building Technology
Discrete Automation: Robotic Construction Workflow for Reconfigurable Timber Housing
Work less, work for everyone, automate everything, produce what is necessary and redistribute everything. It is a call to action for an equitable society, advocating for automation, reduced working hours, necessary production and resource redistribution.
In order to contribute to this vision, the study presents an innovative automated construction workflow that involves human-robot collaboration for a discretised timber construction system. The focus is on the system’s connectivity development that can work in the syntax of robotics and circularity. The discrete aspect acts as an interface of the combination of these areas. To demonstrate the capabilities of the system, a housing design is developed for a site in Rotterdam aiming at affordability. The design incorporates circularity principles, including modularity, design-for-disassembly, design-for-reuse, reconfigurability and extension of material lifespan. A combinatorial design workflow is proposed, focusing on the assembly of generic discrete elements into function-based aggregated structures that can be rearranged over time.