ROBOTIC LANDSCAPES — NATURE, COMPUTATION, AND THE DESIGN SPACE OF AUTONOMOUS TERRAIN MODELING

Abstract

An experimental studio on a highway site in Canton of Ticino in Switzerland held at the ETH in the fall of 2017 is the result of a collaborative project with the National Center of Competence in Research Digital Fabrication, ETH Zürich. The work shows a series of designs that were developed through procedural and robotic principles. The landscape models based on a Lidar point cloud data set of the entire Ticino Valley served as the basis of all terrain operations. The results obtained after a 15-week studio are encouraging and show the way towards a new way of conceiving landscapes through robotic design.

A pedagogical protocol for iterative robotic fabrication on remote grounds

“…The first project represents a large, almost architectural scale; the second represents an architectural site ground; and the third simulates the construction of architectural or landscape elements. This expands the current pedagogical aspects researched in the "Robotic Landscapes" studio, which focus on a single site and exploration scale in the laboratory setting [3] (Girot and Hurkxkens, 2018). The possibility to work iteratively, across scales, using the same setup and similar tools is indicative of what is proposed here as the collapse of scale.…”

“…Determinacy, thus, needs to be replaced by an iterative form of design sensitivity, allowing the terrain and its particular features to shape the parametric design approach for the robotic handling of earthen materials (Bar-Sinai et al, 2019). While current architectural pedagogy addresses unpredictable soil dynamics, onsite testing conducted by an autonomous excavator and integration of both aspects in the design process (Girot and Hurkxkens, 2018), there is still a need for structured iterative protocols which factor in the uncertainty and reduce it throughout the process.…”

“…3. The "Robotic Landscapes" studio employed a single scale of laboratory exploration, while largerscale testing was performed onsite through direct terrain manipulation using an autonomous robotic tool (Girot and Hurkxkens, 2018).…”

“…These encourage a return to the use of native, onsite soil with robotic tools (Perrot et al, 2018). Finally, the value of workmanship is gaining renewed relevance in the context of digital design as a way to re-establish traditional crafts using robotic tools (Golsteijn et al, 2014;Tanti and Mostafavi, 2014;Girot and Hurkxkens, 2018;Shaked and Dubin, 2019).…”