매사추세츠공대, 스스로 유리섬유 구조물을 짜는 ‘파이버봇’ 개발 VIDEO: Fiberbots – Framework for cooperative (swarm) robotic manufacturing
Fiberbots – Framework for cooperative (swarm) robotic manufacturing
Published: 27/09/2018
written by Filip Visnjic
Created by the team at MIT Media Lab’s Meditated Matter Group, Fiberbots is a digital fabrication framework fusing cooperative swarm robotic manufacturing with abilities to generate highly sophisticated material structures. The framework can enable design and digital fabrication of large-scale structures with high spatial resolution leveraging mobile fabrication nodes, or robotic ‘agents’.
겨울의 극한 추위를 견디고 있는 파이버봇(Fiberbots)의 구조물 모습/creativeapplications.net
매사추세츠공대, 스스로 유리섬유 구조물 짜는 시스템 파이버봇 개발 원하는 모양으로 구조물을 제작해 나가 MIT 미디어 랩의 Medrated Matter Group의 팀이 만든 파이버봇(Fiberbots)은 고도로 정교한 재료 구조를 만들 수 있는 능력을 가진 협력적 군집 로봇 제작 위해 융합된 디지털 제작 프레임워크이다. 이 프레임워크를 통해 모바일 제작 노드 또는 로봇 '에이전트'를 활용하여 공간 해상도가 높은 대규모 구조의 설계 및 디지털 제작이 가능하다 자연의 건축가들은 여러 가지 재료 특성을 제어하고 최적화하기 위해 계층 구조를 활용하고 있다. 예를 들어, 거미들은 단백질 섬유들을 빙 둘러 감아서 그것의 재료 구성 및 섬유 배치를 조절하여 먹이를 잡는데 최적화되었다. 파이버봇은 섬유유리 필라멘트를 그들 주위에 감아 높은 강도의 관 구조를 만들기 위해 고안된 군 로봇 시스템이다. 이러한 구조들은 병렬로 건설될 수 있고 상호 결합되어 신속하게 건축 구조를 만들 수 있다. 로봇은 이동형이고 센서 피드백을 사용하여 맞춤형 환경정보 기반 설계 프로토콜에 의해 결정된 경로에 따라 개별 튜브의 길이와 곡률을 제어한다 파이버봇이 다른 시스템과 구분되는 특징은 미리 정해진 형태의 모듈을 조합하는 기존의 방식과 달리 거미처럼 원하는 모양으로 구조물을 만들어 나갈 수 있다는 점이다 황기철 콘페이퍼 에디터 큐레이터 Ki Cheol Hwang, conpaper editor, curator |
edited by kcontents
Some of nature’s most successful organisms collaborate in a swarm fashion. Nature’s builders leverage hierarchical structures in order to control and optimize multiple material properties. Spiders, for instance, spin protein fibers to weave silk webs with tunable local and global material properties, adjusting their material composition and fiber placement to create strong yet flexible structures optimized to capture prey. Other organisms, such as bees, ants, and termites cooperate to rapidly build structures much larger than themselves. |
↑ Robot functions
The Fiberbots are a swarm of robots designed to wind fiberglass filament around themselves to create high-strength tubular structures. These structures can be built in parallel and interwoven to rapidly create architectural structures. The robots are mobile and use sensor feedback to control the length and curvature of each individual tube according to paths determined by a custom, environmentally informed, flocking-based design protocol. The 16 robots, including the design system to control them, were developed in-house and deployed to autonomously create a 4.5m tall structure.
To integrate generative design protocols with tangible construction, the team developed a flocking-based design strategy in conjunction with the design of swarm robotics fabrication system. In this system, the designer specifies a number of structural constrains such as adhesion, alignment, global goals, curling bias, and global avoidance regions, and robot constraints such as local collision regions and maximum curvatures. With this approach the designer can control the shape and structure swarm robots can build, including pre-designing and simulating the structure prior to construction.
Currently, a central wireless controller communicates with all robots, assigns tasks, monitors their progress and tracks their progression. Though the system is autonomous, a user can intervene during the construction process, at any given stage, to pause or change commands to an individual or set of robots without affecting the other robots.
As photos above show, the team built a 4.5m tall pavilion using 16 swarm robots in parallel over the course of two days. Robots were clustered into groups of four and each cluster was placed in a square configuration 1.75m apart. At the first, in the lower parts of the structure the robots were operating in groups and then came together at the top to create an enclosed space. Each robot fabricated about 0.8m of tube per hour and the speed varied depending on the thickness of each tube they were building.
This research seeks to depart from these uniaxial fabrication methods and develop fabrication units capable of being highly communicative while simultaneously depositing tailorable, multifunctional materials. Moreover, the team plans to demonstrate that their research framework is applicable across scales: from the micro-scale to the product scale and, uniquely, to the architectural scale.
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