Yesterday night the first installation to be built by flying machines opened its doors to the public. An hour or so after the Opening, after most of the crowd had gone to drink champagne in the building next door, I snuck upstairs and recorded a few short clips of the quadrocopters.
The installation, called "Flight Assembled Architecture", was conceived
and built by teams led by my colleagues Fabio Gramazio & Matthias
Kohler as well as Raffaello D'Andrea at the ETH Zurich. It illustrates a
radically new way of thinking about materializing architecture: Use a
multitude of mobile flying agents working in parallel and acting
together as a scalable production means. As you can see in the video,
the quadrocopters are programmed to interact, lift, transport and
assemble small modules in order to erect a building.
The tower is actually a 1:100 model of a "vertical village" with a
height of 600 meters and housing 30'000 inhabitants. To learn more about
the technology (control architecture, collision avoidance and freeway
based flight, prick placement, safety systems, etc.) and architectural
aspects (geographic location, transit times, access plans, structural
and wind tunnel analysis, etc.), have a look at
http://www.idsc.ethz.ch/Research_DAndrea/fmec
