Rapid Formation
Arup also worked with Ai Build,
a
UK startup specialising in
artificial
intelligence and 3D-printing applications, to create
an elegant and structurally
efficient
form with an optimised
distribution of material. What made the Daedalus Pavilion
autonomous fabrication project so revolutionary was the
scale and speed of the build. The beautiful structure was
unveiled at the GPU Technology Conference in Amsterdam in
September 2016.
The pavilion was constructed by
a
robotic arm and
a
mechanism that deployed corn-based plastic raw material.
Algorithms and cameras acted as eyes to see if and where
discrepancies were made, and the robot, with
a
feedback
mechanism, corrected itself as it went along. While the robotic
arm reach allowed for the greater print size, this locally
approximate (but globally accurate) deposition method enabled
a
massive increase in depositing speed necessary to make the large-
scale print practical. This approximation made the pavilion look
more like
a
hand-knitted jumper from one’s grandmother than
mass-produced and purchased in
a
shop.
The feedback loop was the main innovation, made possible
because the robot could see what it was printing and adapt. It
used advanced computer vision algorithms to detect how the
printing was ...
