Man, I am just so tired of my furniture resting on something as predictable as the floor. Sick of conventional couches and daybeds on which to have boring naps. Good thing these mini robots weavers that can build gravity-defying structures exist.
Maria Yablonina, who graduated from the University of Stuttgart, worked with her university’s Institute for Computational Design and devised a carbon fiber weaving method with the use of small robots.
These robots, Roomba-like in appearance, can climb walls and ceilings with the use of internal fans that keep them suctioned to any surface. They can quickly and cheaply build structures that would be extremely difficult any other way, reports Dezeen. The robots “work in concert to pull fiber filaments across a space, creating a structure onsite.”
The project is called Mobile Robotic Fabrication System for Filament Structures—a mouthful of a name. I prefer calling it SpiderBot.
This project might be the beginning of something very mainstream. Predicts Dezeen:
The project constitutes a form of “swarm construction” – a fabrication method, predicted to be common in the future, that involves swarms of small robots working together.
If you’ll remember, the Decepticons have that kind of tech on lock, so it’s about time the human race caught up.
For now, one of the project’s main hindrances lies in the power source: the robots have to be plugged into an external power source with a cable, which limits their movement and application.
Where carbon fiber is used extensively in the automotive sphere, it is “architecture’s biggest untapped resource,” an architect told Dezeen in an earlier interview. Combining that with swarm construction could yield a never-before-seen stage of architectural design and technology.
This project is very pleasing to my wild imagination. I wonder if it would it work to connect two building to each other, so people don’t have to go downstairs, cross a street, and go back upstairs in the other building. I wonder if it would help people with tiny apartments save floorspace by perhaps providing an alternative bed. It seems like the possibilities are endless.