Robotic Landscapes: Topological Approaches to Terrain, Design, and Fabrication

Abstract

The practice of earth-moving is an increasingly important undertaking in creating and sustaining resilient urban and landscape environments. The recent increase in natural hazards like sea-level rise, landslides, floods, and drought, point to the delicate balance that exists in our ecosystems. While heavy equipment used to construct large-scale earthworks in response to natural hazards has existed for over a century, they are incapable of reacting to the constant progression of landscape processes driven by environmental change. As such, taking informed and regenerative action on any of these challenges has proven problematic. Situated in the context of landscape architecture, this dissertation presents a new design and construction approach to working with terrain. Building upon recent advances in surveying techniques and mobile robotic fabrication with heavy equipment, it investigates new design processes and robotic formation strategies in natural granular material. It introduces digital terrain modelling tools based on distance functions that support a dynamic modelling approach by integrating information, design, and fabrication techniques. This dissertation implements these tools in combination with lidar scanners and robotic platforms, to propose adaptive, emergent, and open-ended formation strategies for earth-moving practices. It outlines a reflexive design process that is elaborated between surveying, modelling, and simulation methods in order to support the design and fabrication of terrain structures that evolve over time. Here, form and forces are equally considered in the investigation of earthworks in response to erosion, transportation, and sedimentation processes in natural environments. The dissertation formulates four core concepts of dynamic formation—substance, process, grammar, and form—and identifies constraints for the application of robotic fabrication in the terrain. This dissertation argues for earthworks capable of mediating performance between ecological and urban landscapes in opposition to creating predefined and static landscapes for an ever-changing environment. By designing topological rules to transform granular material into functional structures, it searches for a newfound equilibrium informed by natural and robotic processes in terrain.