New 3D printing processes optimize digital designs and produce material efficiency to advance sustainability and broaden participation in construction. However, we know little about how to design to support young people learning how digital technologies foster sustainability in construction. This research investigated AMC Edu:Lab, a mobile learning environment that integrates robotic clay extrusion, digital modeling, and learning activities, and how it may support learning about sustainability in construction. We designed AMC Edu:Lab in two phases based on design recommendations for inclusive learning environments. Phase 1 included lab tours and co-design sessions with 3D printing experts. Phase 2 conducted youth workshops to evaluate the design's effectiveness. The results present AMC Edu:Lab, including 10 learning activities, and how the design fostered engagement with sustainability in construction. Findings have implications for digital education, calling for the inclusion of tangible materials to support learning about the interplay of digitalization and sustainability.

In this paper we present a system for the in situ33In the context of building construction, “in situ” means that fabrication takes place at the structure's final location directly on the building site. 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.

Despite the recent advances in, and the adoption of robotic technologies in the construction industry, the architectural processes which demand a high degree of geometric freedom still remain largely labour intensive and manual. This is due to the inherent difficulties in robotizing the current implementation of such processes coupled with the lack of alternate robotic technologies. A specific example, which is also the focus of this paper, is that of building a steel reinforced concrete structure, with varying curvature or cross-section. This process still remains rather manual and requires extensive support of customized form-work. In this paper, first we describe an alternate novel robotic fabrication process for building steel wire meshes which act as both reinforcement and formwork. The robotization of such a process is discussed with the use of a previously developed mobile robotic system. Based on the specifications derived from the process, design of a novel custom designed robotic end-effector, enabling this process, is detailed. Automation of the full robotic system comprising the mobile robotic system and the robotic end-effector is discussed from simulation to control. Through experimental evaluation of the robotic system, we demonstrate the ability to fully automate the construction of non-standard steel reinforced steel meshes of varying curvature and cell sizes.

Despite the prevalent use of robotic technologies in industrial manufacturing, their use on building construction sites is still very limited. This is mainly due to the unstructured nature of construction sites and the fact that the structures built must be larger than the machines which build them. This paper addresses these difficulties by presenting a repositioning and localization system which, using purely on-board sensing, allows a mobile robot to maintain a high degree of end-effector positioning accuracy while moving among numerous building positions during a building task. We introduce a newly developed machine, called the In situ Fabricator (IF), whose goal is to bring digital fabrication to the construction site. The capabilities of the repositioning and localization system is demonstrated through the construction of a vertical stack of bricks, in which the IF repositions itself after placing each brick. With this experiment, we demonstrate that the IF can build with sub-centimeter accuracy over long building sequences.