Semi-autonomous flying robots programmed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler begin a project today in France to lift, transport and assemble 1500 polystyrene foam bricks into the a 6 metre tall tower.
Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello d’Andrea, ‘Flight Assembled Architecture, the first installation to be built by flying machines’, takes place at the FRAC Center and the installation itself will be open from December 2nd to February 9, 2012.
Motion capture sensors will track each drone in the airspace at 370 fps and feed that information to a precision fleet management program that issues instructions, the aim to prevent the drones from smashing into one another.
The drones are able to coordinate with millimetre precision, lifting the individual blocks onto the growing tower, thanks to a suite of on-board sensors.
The architects are interested in using the full potential of digital design and fabrication. They conceived the architectural structure at scale to a 600m high “vertical village”, the installation addresses radical new ways of thinking and materializing architecture as a physical process of dynamic formation.
Images courtesy Dezeen
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