Accurate and Adaptive In situ Fabrication of an Undulated Wall using an On-Board Visual Sensing System

Abstract

In this paper we present a system for the in situ fabrication of a full-scale, load-bearing, and doubly-curved steel reinforced concrete wall. Two complementary vision-based sensing systems provide the feedback necessary to build a 12 meter long steel wire mesh as part of a novel digital building process. The sensing systems provide estimates of the robot pose, referenced to the CAD model of the building site, as well as feedback on the accuracy of the built structure over the course of construction. This second piece of information is used to adapt the building plan to compensate for system inaccuracies and material deformations which occur during buildup. In this way, the structure was successfully built with 98% of the total geometry within 2 centimeters of the designed position. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest structure which has been built by a mobile robot using solely vision-based sensing.