Robots – Page 2

The Robot and the Architect are Friends

[Image: The architect and his construction robots by Villemard].

In 1910, French artist Villemard produced a series of illustrations depicting what life might be like in the year 2000, including an architect and his robotic construction crew.

In an article published last summer in Icon, called “The Robot and the Architect are Friends,” Will Wiles wrote that Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler “have a vision: architecture using robotics to take command of all aspects of construction. Liberated from the sidelines, the profession would be freed to unleash all its creative potential—all thanks to its obedient servants, the robots. But first, architects must learn the robots’ language.”

[Image: Courtesy of Icon].

It all sounds deceptively easy at first: the architects have merely to program their robotic arm “to pick up a brick and place it, and then to repeat the process with variations. When this program runs, the result is a wall.”

The machine itself moves with the clipped grace we associate with robotics, performing neat, discrete actions that contain within them an assortment of fluid swivels and turns. These quick-slow, deliberate movements are hypnotic. It’s beautiful to watch but, because it moves in a way that looks animal while being unlike anything we know in nature, there’s something in it that’s inescapably unnerving.

Given multiple robots, sufficient bricks, complex instructions, and enough time, “extraordinary forms” can result, patterned and pixellated, brick-by-brick.

[Image: “Pike Loop” (2009) by Gramazio & Kohler].

“Considering the revolutionary potential of their work,” Wiles writes, “you might expect a note of utopian zeal from the pair.” He quickly adds, on the other hand, that, “if you want dazzling Wellsian predictions, delivered with glittering eyes, of future armies of architect-controlled mechanoids transforming the world, you’ve come to the wrong place.” Gramazio & Kohler’s vision is, instead, “understated, modest, [and] reasonable.”

Nonetheless, some combination of Villemardian enthusiasm—airborne tennis!—with rigorous architectural robotics, and perhaps even with emerging new brick designs and a new generation of 3D printers, is an enticing vision to pursue for the future of building construction.

(Villemard image originally seen via Selectism, thanks to a tip from Jon Bucholtz. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Flying Robotic Construction Cloud).

Flying Robotic Construction Cloud

Quentin Lindsey, Daniel Mellinger, and Vijay Kumar from the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab—General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception—have devised a system whereby autonomous flying helicopters can assemble a rudimentary architectural grid using small magnetic beams.

This technology begs a series of questions, of course, including who might first pick up on and directly invest in this construction process (the field exploration wings of transnational oil-services firms? forward-operating base commanders of the 22nd-century U.S. military? rogue GSD students self-supported by a family trust fund?), what sorts of architectural styles might result given the technical and material limitations associated with magnetic cloud-construction (a return to the minimalist grid? Sol Lewitt as architectural progenitor?), and how successfully this could be scaled up to the dimensions of whole towns and cities.

It might not be altogether unfeasible, in other words, given enough time and investment, that we’ll someday see flocks of autonomous helicopters roaring off into western Australia, or into the Canadian Arctic, autonomously assembling supply-chain-governed grid-cities where every magnet, bolt, beam, and screw is dutifully accounted for and guided into place by intelligent airborne mechanisms. Then the humans move in.

Or, extending this into the clichéd territory where BLDGBLOG and the Terminator begin to overlap, perhaps the machines will construct factories for the production of more machines, which will then fly onward and further to build yet more factories, constructing a sovereign halo of autonomous machine-urbanism in the earth’s north polar latitudes.

(Via @WillWiles).

The Robot A-Z

[Image: The yellow chipboards of the Fanuc global headquarters; courtesy of Fanuc].

On the flight back to Los Angeles yesterday I read about the corporate campus of Fanuc, “a secretive maker of robots and industrial automation gear,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

“Some 60 percent of the world’s precision machine tools use Fanuc’s controls,” the article explains, “which give lathes, grinders, and milling machines the agility to turn metal into just about any manufactured product.” As if suggesting a future art installation by Jeff Koons—sponsored by Boeing—we read about a man who uses “a milling machine with Fanuc controls to sculpt 747 parts.” (The company’s robot A-Z shows off their other goods).

[Image: Assembly robots by Fanuc].

But it’s the description of the firm’s actual facilities that caught my eye. “Fanuc‘s headquarters, a sprawling complex in a forest on the slopes of Mount Fuji, looks like something out of a sci-fi flick”:

Workers in yellow jumpsuits with badges on their shoulders trot among yellow buildings as yellow cars hum along pine-lined roads. Fanuc lore holds that the founder, Seiuemon Inaba, believed yellow “promotes clear thinking.”Inside the compound’s windowless factories, an army of (yes, yellow) robots works 24/7. “On a factory floor as big as a football field you might see four people. It’s basically just robots reproducing themselves.”

Thing is, if you want to see more—to see this strange origin-site for contemporary intelligent machines—you can’t. “Outsiders are rarely allowed inside the facility, and workers not engaged in research are barred from labs,” Businessweek adds. “‘I can’t even get in,’ quips a board member who asks that his name not be used.”

In a way, I’m reminded of South Korea’s plans for its own “Robot Land,” an “industrial city built specifically for the robotics industry,” that will have “all sorts of facilities for the research, development, and production of robots, as well as things like exhibition halls and even a stadium for robot-on-robot competitions.”

Here, though, alone amidst other versions of themselves in the pines of Mt. Fuji, “the world’s most reliable robots” take shape in secret, shelled in yellow, reproducing themselves, forming a robot city of their own.

Mars Rover: A New Film by BLDGBLOG

While editing a recent post about the Mars rover, I got to thinking – as you would – about how to make an animated, feature-length children’s film, starring another such rover, set in the immediate future…

In the film, the rover would go tootling around in its cute little animated way, wheeling across unbelievable landscapes, snapping Ansel Adams-like photographs of alien tectonics, volcanoes and basins, systems of canyons that redefine the sublime.

Hills, arches, gorges; mountains surrounded by clouds of methane. Erosion; windstorms; evidence of ancient floods.
Plus, it’s a cute little rover. Kids love the thing. They pressure their parents to name family pets after it. Burger King sells a small plastic version of it with their happy meals, or whatever they make there. T-shirts. Pajamas.

In any case, our erstwhile hero, the little rover, is Artificially Intelligent – and he’s funny. Maybe his voice is by Paul Giamatti. And he gradually sort of wakes up, comes to consciousness, and falls head over heels – monitor over wheels – in love with the world, in love with landscapes, with everything – with emotion and memory – with hope and fear – and he starts to wax poetic over a radio-link back to mission control, his friends and creators, they’re cheering, to television viewers sitting on sofas at home, going on about how wonderful everything is.
How beautiful that world, in which he travels alone, can really be. It’s not lonely, see. He’s on fire inside. His own little robot mind is as deep as the canyons he explores.

Kids in the cinema aren’t blinking at this point; it’s too amazing. Everyone’s in love with this little rover. Everyone’s alive. Cynics are vomiting into popcorn boxes.
But then the Martian seasons change, and the rover has to shut down – to be shut down, by mission control. The kids in the cinema start to worry. Frowns appear. Dads grow nervous, re-crossing their legs, only vaguely reassured that the film is rated PG.
You see people on-screen, back at mission control, wringing their hands, preparing to remotely shut off the rover – but the rover loves life, damn it, he loves what he’s seeing, he wants to see more! He wants to live – and he’s funny – and he’s got a friend back at mission control who has to push the button, but she can’t because she loves him – what do you mean shut him down?! – she loves his silly robot eyes, and his enthusiasm, and his stupid voice, and these amazing things he’s been showing to everyone back on earth, and she can’t do it.
She can’t kill the little guy.

Some kids are crying now; she’s crying. Not the little guy! With his tiny wheels pushing further into life and alien landscapes.
Not him!
Enter some sinister, technocratic boss figure – with a voice by Robert Duvall – and he forces her: the button is pushed, mission control sends the command, and our friendly, naive robot hero of off-planet landscape exploration, in the midst of a sad why are you doing this to me? weepy monologue, his AI-eyes wide and worried and scared of that darkness into which his circuits will go – overlooking the most beautiful canyon he’s discovered so far – suddenly he is no more.

The rover’s eye-lights fade. Martian winds erase his tracks. Grown men wipe away tears before their wives can see them.
The credits roll.
Kids leave the cinema howling. Moms give out hugs left and right. Oscar nominations roll in. I retire to Arizona on the proceeds and begin carving strange topological forms into the desert floor.
Movie producers: you know where to find me.

Mars and its stunt double

[Images: A “faux Mars” being air-brushed and constructed in a lab in southern California “to simulate the environment” on the red planet. Contrast that with a photo taken by Spirit, the robotic Ansel Adams of Mars, showing “Larry’s Lookout, a pit stop along the robot’s uphill trail as it explores the red planet.”

‘Animaris Mammoth’

At the risk of repeating another article, I’ll just quote liberally instead: Lakshmi Sandhana writes in *Wired* (24 Jan 05: *Wild Things Are on the Beach*) about Theo Jansen, an artist ‘evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind.’ ‘His latest creations contain lemonade bottles in their body structure into which the wind is slowly pumped, enabling the creature to walk for a couple of minutes afterward. (…) He says a future version – a 12-ton behemoth, big enough to have several rooms inside – could be called the Animaris Mammoth.’
A friend of Jansen’s, Carl Pisaturo, another robotics designer, refers to a collapsed Jansenian creature as ‘a tipped-over, short-circuited machine half-buried in beach sand’ – surely outdoing the end of *Planet of the Apes*, or at least competing.
So could you do that with a building? It captures wind in huge flexible sacks that gradually return to normal size, pumping the air into a complex network of pneumatic tubing; these then power the elevators, vents, and whatever else you need. The plumbing perhaps. When you go through the doldrums of a windless Spring, the building effectively shuts down. But in a windstorm, you’d be forgiven for thinking the building was artificially intelligent. Constant motion, unpredictable internal rearrangements.
Artificial intelligence through wind. An architectural version of the Aeolian harp. Covered in sails and windsacs. A huge architectural lung, traveling slowly over the coastal landscape, fourteen thousand years after humans have gone extinct.
And then it collapses…

Post-human car park

An apartment building in Washington DC, the Summit Grand Parc, comes complete with a fully automated, multistory, underground car park. If you’re rich enough to have a parking spot at the Parc – no pun intended – you just type in your code, leave your car, and then watch as it’s inched forward atop a moving platform and deposited into its own specific parking spot deep underground.

“The floor is a giant metal turntable that circumscribes a smaller, car-sized metal rectangle” – a kind of mandala, geometries within geometries, smooth and automated. “If the car’s not too big or fat, the driver – aided by a low-slung mirror and a sign that says ‘Drive right’ or ‘Pull forward’ based on data from some more lasers and motion sensors – nestles the tires into two grooves that run diagonally along the length of the metal rectangle.” (All quotations from Josh Levin, “The Valet You Don’t Have To Tip,” 1 April 2004, slate.com).

The possibilities for film sets – *Mission Impossible 3* etc – are immediately obvious. A new Kafka adaptation. A Steve Martin film.

See also this company, and this one, the latter of whom have the catchy phrase: “We compact parking space.”

The “Wöhr Auto Parksysteme,” outlined on their website, includes “parking towers,” “Carports,” “Multiparkers,” and other descriptions of their “innovative parking concept” – the vocabulary alone justifying entire new textbooks in urban planning & design. You can also download cool CAD-files from them.

Hard not to imagine vast automated landscapes operating without human intervention, installed parasitically in the basements and attics and corridors and backyards of all our buildings, the surface of the earth hollow, crawling and turning and flowing across & through itself. Or a new cable channel: The Parking Network. Innovative Parking: The Magazine. Or a new sci-fi novel: *I, Parker*. A man alone in the automated parking decks of an alien planet… Starring Val Kilmer. Sculpted by Auguste Rodin. Car parks that come complete with their own soundtracks, and are wafted continually with rare perfumes.