Architecture will lose its formal rigidity, softening and flexing and getting closer to the life we see in plants.
As scientists make huge strides in robotics, natural building materials, and new construction methods, our urban architecture could take on a much different form than the rigid construction we’re used to.
As complex ecosystems, cities are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the massive resource requirements and outflow of cities, there are signs that a deeper current of biology is working its way into the urban framework.
Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions. Construction itself may be handled by bacterial printers and swarms of mechanical assemblers.
Much of the modern built environment we experience began its life in CAD software. In the Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter lab at Autodesk Research, engineers are developing tools to model the microscopic world. Project Cyborg helps researchers simulate atomic and molecular interactions, providing a platform to programmatically design matter. Autodesk recently partnered with Organovo, a firm developing functional bioprinters that can print living tissues. This pairing extends the possibilities from molecular design to biofabrication, enabling rapid prototyping of everything from pharmaceuticals to nanomachines.
Tools like Project Cyborg make possible a deeper exploration of biomimicry through the precise manipulation of matter. David Benjamin and his Columbia Living Architecture Lab explore ways to integrate biology into architecture. Their recent work investigates bacterial manufacturing–the genetic modification of bacteria to create durable materials. Envisioning a future where bacterial colonies are designed to print novel materials at scale, they see buildings wrapped in seamless, responsive, bio-electronic envelopes.
From molecular printing to volume manufacturing, roboticist Enrico Dini has fabricated a 3D printer large enough to print houses from sand. He’s now teamed up with the European Space Agency to investigate deploying his D-Shape printer to the moon in hopes of churning lunar soil into a habitable base. Though realization of this effort remains distant, it’s notable to show how the thinking–and money–is moving to scale 3-D printing well beyond the desktop.
While printers integrate new materials and scale up to make bigger things, another approach to construction focuses on programming group dynamics. Like corals, beehives, and termite colonies, there’s a scalar effect gained from coordinating large numbers of simple agents towards complex goals.
The Robobees project at Harvard is exploring micro-scale robotics, wireless sensor arrays, and multi-agent systems to build robotic insects that exhibit the swarming behaviors of bees. They see a future where “coordinated agile robotic insects” are used for agriculture, search and rescue, and (of course) military surveillance. Taking a cue from mound-building termites, the TERMES project is developing a robotic swarm construction system. The team is working to get cooperative robots building things bigger than themselves by mapping the rules underlying emergence in autonomous distributed populations. Mike Rubenstein leads another Harvard lab, Kilobot, creating a “low cost scalable robot system for demonstrating collective behaviors”. His lab, along with the work of researcher’s like Nancy Lynch at MIT, are laying the frameworks for asynchronous distributed networks and multi-agent coordination, aka swarm robotics.
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Cities Of The Future
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- Northwest Arkansas cities must coordinate future growth to say out of each other’s way, forum speakers sayon May 8, 2024 at 11:03 pm
Smith papers the walls of his Rogers office with different cities' maps of their sewer lines -- because Northwest Arkansas offers no master map of this vital infrastructure. "Cities have maps of their ...
- Three ‘cities of the future’ that could change the way we liveon May 8, 2024 at 8:20 pm
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- THE ROLE OF HERITAGE CONSERVATION IN FUTURE-PROOFING CITIESon May 7, 2024 at 8:24 pm
Cities are without a doubt a reflection of humanity’s hierarchy of needs, especially since the global population has had an urban majority since 2008[1] with Malaysia’s urbanisation rate exceeding 75 ...
- Pioneering Sustainable Urban Growth: Intelligent City's Blueprint For The Future Cityon May 7, 2024 at 2:00 pm
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- Latest Developments in the Selection of WrestleMania Host Citieson May 6, 2024 at 8:55 am
The search for the future host city of WWE WrestleMania has taken a surprising turn with the recent announcement by WWE on May 4. WrestleMania 41 has been officially confirmed to take place in Las ...
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Robotic swarm construction
- Six-armed robot designed for precision pollinationon May 13, 2024 at 4:41 am
The six-armed Stickbug is a precision pollination robot that reportedly combines the accuracy of single-agent systems with swarm parallelization in greenhouses.
- Swarm of tiny snail robots stick together to form new structureson May 8, 2024 at 6:15 am
Researchers have built a swarm of miniature, snail-inspired robots, minus all the mucus. Instead, a retractable suction cup works in tandem with the remote-controlled machine’s tank-like treads to ...
- Video: Iron-shelled robo-snails swarm together for off-road taskson May 2, 2024 at 5:00 pm
In recent years we've heard a lot about "swarm robotics." This concept involves utilizing small robots that can work either on their own or as one facet of a group of identical bots. In the latter ...
- Scientists unveil giant robot bees that can fly and SWARM in groups autonomouslyon May 2, 2024 at 9:14 am
SCIENTISTS are creating a buzz after unveiling a giant robotic bee that can fly in a swarm. The so-called BionicBee measures 22cm long and weighs less than a typical slice of bread. And it can ...
- Miniature robotic bees navigate swarm flight autonomouslyon April 30, 2024 at 8:46 am
Festo, the master in developing bionic flying objects, has unveiled ultra-light, delicately designed robotic bees. Named BionicBee, it is part of the German automation company’s Bionic Learning ...
- Robotic Mic Swarm Helps Pull Voices Out Of Crowded Room Of Multiple Speakerson October 4, 2023 at 12:15 am
This robotic “acoustic swarm” can not only differentiate voices and their precise locations in a room, but it achieves this monumental task purely based on sound, ditching the need for cameras ...
- swarm roboticson October 3, 2023 at 5:01 pm
One of the persistent challenges in audio technology has been distinguishing individual voices in a room full of chatter. In virtual meeting settings, the moderator can simply hit the mute button ...
- Like a swarm of bees, these 3D printing robots can build almost any structureon April 14, 2022 at 5:01 pm
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