Markus Giftthaler

ETH Zurich

Wednesday, July 05, 2017, 11:00

Room 01-012, Georges-Köhler-Allee 102, Freiburg 79110, Germany

This talk presents the concept of an "In situ Fabricator", a mobile robot intended for manufacturing, assembly and digital fabrication on construction sites. We present an overview of a prototype system, its capabilities, and highlight the importance of high-performance control, estimation and planning algorithms for achieving desired construction goals. We detail an an example architectural application scenario, which shows that an In situ Fabricator in combination with an innovative digital fabrication tool can be used to enable completely novel building technologies. For efficient everyday use, future building construction robots need to be able to execute subroutines or building tasks without supervision by an expert user. In this context, we present an exemplary application of constrained Sequential Linear Quadratic Optimal Control for efficient kinematic planning of mobile manipulators with non-holonomic constraints.