Autonomous Assembly

Notes

1. ‘North Korea’s Amazingly Choreographed Human Mosaics’, 30 April 2013: www.odditycentral.com/events/north-

koreas-amazingly-choreographed-human-mosaics.html.

2. Austin Weber, ‘ASSEMBLY Planbook: Man vs Machine’, ASSEMBLY, 28 February 2008: www.assemblymag.com/

articles/85269-assembly-planbook-man-vs-machine.

3. ‘The Human vs Machine Race in Manufacturing’, 23 April 2014: www.sikich.com/blog/post/The-Human-vs-

Machine-Race-in-Manufacturing#.WCCyveErJE5.

4. This Is Not a Ball, directed by Vik Muniz and Juan Rendón, Netflix, 2014.

5. Benjamin Lafreniere et al, ‘Crowdsourced Fabrication’, in Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User

Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’16), ACM (New York), 2016, pp 15–28.

Hive

Extending these prior examples into the realm of 3D construction,

Hive is an architectural-scale pavilion made from 224 tensegrity

parts built by humans and robots working in close collaboration.

Assembled at Autodesk University in Las Vegas over the course of

three days in 2015, unskilled volunteer workers were guided through

a sequence of construction steps while directly collaborating with

a group of UR-10 robotic arms.5 Instructions were generated by a

central software engine and distributed in real time to the workers

using a custom smart-watch application. ...