FLYING ROBOT CONSTRUCTION
Yesterday I had the pleasure to see the LIVE STREAM of the TED conference in Long Beach and I must admit there were some really amazing talks all heading and proving ideas that we develop with FutureCityLab. So it´s great to see we are not alone out there ;)
The next days I will write some more posts about the impressions of the talks. Also TED was really fast in publishing some talks only. The first videos are available on youtube already today. So I would like to start with one of the talks that made it online already: Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly … and cooperate
Vijay and his team at MIT are developing little quadro-copters that act autonomously. They can remember and detect obstacles. The little robots can fly swarm formations and play music ;)
Amazingly they can also autonomously construct structures which reminds me of the Gramazio & Kohler installation “Flight Assembled Architecture”.
Watching both the videos I leave it up to your imagination how our buildings and difficult structures will be assembled in future. Probably construction will become faster and cheaper. Maybe even taller?
photo (c) François Lauginie | Gramazio & Kohler
It´s striking how this simultaneously appearing of similar ideas proves the “REMIX EVERYTHING” theory by Kirby Ferguson.
In his third part of his video manifesto he explains that ideas happen at the same time in different places and that they are inavitable and part of a common intelligence. Maybe we could even call it a swarm intelligence that we have as a society. Of course nowadays this links become just much more obvious and we can trace it much better.
Another amazing project of Vijay Kumar´s project is the outdoor version of the flying robots. Equipped with a laser scanner and a Microsoft Kinect the quadrocopter can scan and memorize unknown buildings and environments! Imagine GOOGLE buying some of this robots in future and scanning all public buildings worldwide ;)
