Construction robots spooling fiberglass filament unveiled by MIT's Mediated Matter Group

2018-10-12T15:00:00-04:00

MIT's Mediated Matter Group has developed a construction robot that winds fiberglass filament into large structures. The research studio, led by Neri Oxman, has dubbed the little machines, Fiberbots, and hopes they can one-day be used to build complicated, large-scale structures.

Credit: The Mediated Matter Group

The way it works is that each Fiberbot is connected to a tank containing fiber and resin. The winding arm sucks the mixture, spins it around the Fiberbot's body, and then uses ultra-violet light to solidify the grown portion. Once hardened, the Fiberbot uses its base to climb up the hardened segment where it then repeats the process. The result is an organically shaped, three-dimensional structure that can climb as high as 15 feet tall.

The robots can angle themselves and change directions in order to complete complex shapes. Mediated Matter also developed a complimenting design system that allows designers to create parameters that govern its shape without having to prov...

Five tenets of a new kind of architecture

2012-12-16T20:56:00-05:00

So when people look at you know, at the ability to 3D print using a robotic arm, they're very, very curious about the possibility of in the future, printing full scale houses, so I think the media lab and specifically in the Media Matter Group, we don't focus only on efficiency translations. For that, I would open a practice in the commercial world, but that's not the function of this lab...

Neri Oxman founder of the Mediated Matter group at MIT’s Media Lab was recently profiled in a 30-minute segment and interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. CNN also published a short essay in which Ms. Oxman begins to define a design credo suitable for the contemporary context, wherein the World-as-Machine is replaced by the World-as- Organism. The five components include; Growth over Assembly, Integration over Segregation, Heterogeneity over Homogeneity, Difference over Repetition and Material is the New Software.

As Bruce Sterling noted elsewhere "Looks like Prof Neri’s working up a manifesto there."

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Construction robots spooling fiberglass filament unveiled by MIT's Mediated Matter Group

Five tenets of a new kind of architecture