MIT researchers have designed a “Digital Construction Platform” system that can 3-D print the basic structure of an entire building. It could enable faster, cheaper, more adaptable building construction — replacing traditional fabrication technologies that are dangerous, slow, and energy-intensive in the annual $8.5 trillion construction industry.

Described in an open-access paper in the journal Science Robotics, this free-moving system is intended to be self-sufficient and can construct an object of almost any size. It could enable the design and construction of new kinds of buildings that would not be feasible with traditional building methods.

A building could be completely customized to the needs of a particular site and the desires of its maker. Even the internal structure could be modified in new ways — different materials could be incorporated as the process goes along, and material density could be varied to provide optimum combinations of strength, insulation, or other properties.

The researchers showed that the system can be easily adapted to existing building sites and equipment, and that it will fit existing building codes without requiring whole new evaluations. Such systems could be deployed to remote regions, for example in the developing world, or to areas for disaster relief after a major storm or earthquake, to provide durable shelter rapidly.

Keating says the team’s analysis shows that such construction methods could produce a structure faster and less expensively than present methods can, and would also be much safer by reducing hands-on work*. In addition, because shapes and thicknesses can be optimized for what is needed structurally, rather than having to match what’s available in premade lumber and other materials, the total amount of material needed could be reduced.

The ultimate vision is “in the future, to have something totally autonomous, that you could send to the moon or Mars or Antarctica, and it would just go out and make these buildings for years,” says Keating, who led the development of the system as his doctoral thesis work. Meanwhile, “with this process, we can replace one of the key parts of making a building, right now,” he says.

* The International Labour Organization estimated in 2005 that more than 50,000 people die globally in the construction industry per year, accounting for 17% of workplace accident fatalities.

Abstract of Toward site-specific and self-sufficient robotic fabrication on architectural scales

Contemporary construction techniques are slow, labor-intensive, dangerous, expensive, and constrained to primarily rectilinear forms, often resulting in homogenous structures built using materials sourced from centralized factories. To begin to address these issues, we present the Digital Construction Platform (DCP), an automated construction system capable of customized on-site fabrication of architectural-scale structures using real-time environmental data for process control. The system consists of a compound arm system composed of hydraulic and electric robotic arms carried on a tracked mobile platform. An additive manufacturing technique for constructing insulated formwork with gradient properties from dynamic mixing was developed and implemented with the DCP. As a case study, a 14.6-m-diameter, 3.7-m-tall open dome formwork structure was successfully additively manufactured on site with a fabrication time under 13.5 hours. The DCP system was characterized and evaluated in comparison with traditional construction techniques and existing large-scale digital construction research projects. Benefits in safety, quality, customization, speed, cost, and functionality were identified and reported upon. Early exploratory steps toward self-sufficiency—including photovoltaic charging and the sourcing and use of local materials—are discussed along with proposed future applications for autonomous construction.