Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

Enabling technologies for precise aerial manufacturing with unmanned aerial vehicles

The construction industry is currently experiencing a revolution with automation techniques such as additive manufacturing and robot-enabled construction. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a key technology that can o er productivity improvement in the construction industry by means of o -site prefabrication and on-site construction with automated systems. The key bene t is that building elements can be fabricated with less materials and higher design freedom compared to traditional manual methods. O -site prefabrication with AM has been investigated for some time already, but it has limitations in terms of logistical issues of components transportation and due to its lack of design exibility on-site. On-site construction with automated systems, such as static gantry systems and mobile ground robots performing AM tasks, can o er additional bene ts over o -site prefabrication, but it needs further research before it will become practical and economical. Ground-based automated construction systems also have the limitation that they cannot extend the construction envelope beyond their physical size. The solution of using aerial robots to liberate the process from the constrained construction envelope has been suggested, albeit with technological challenges including precision of operation, uncertainty in environmental interaction and energy e ciency. This thesis investigates methods of precise manufacturing with aerial robots. In particular, this work focuses on stabilisation mechanisms and origami-based structural elements that allow aerial robots to operate in challenging environments. An integrated aerial self-aligning delta manipulator has been utilised to increase the positioning accuracy of the aerial robots, and a Material Extrusion (ME) process has been developed for Aerial Additive Manufacturing (AAM). A 28-layer tower has been additively manufactured by aerial robots to demonstrate the feasibility of AAM. Rotorigami and a bioinspired landing mechanism demonstrate their abilities to overcome uncertainty in environmental interaction with impact protection capabilities and improved robustness for UAV. Design principles using tensile anchoring methods have been explored, enabling low-power operation and explores possibility of low-power aerial stabilisation. The results demonstrate that precise aerial manufacturing needs to consider not only just the robotic aspects, such as ight control algorithms and mechatronics, but also material behaviour and environmental interaction as factors for its success.Open Acces

Flexible Control in Nanometrology

The unceasing development of new small products has increased constantly by introducing multiple facilities in line production, reduced life cycles of new innovative products, and high-precision techniques that require automation and robotization of the nanotechnology production processes. Classic size products are made in normal series and deal little change over the years, while in the field of nanotechnology, product life cycles were shortened significantly, and series production must adapt to the market challenges. Considering the fast changes and multiple innovations in production, we propose equipment that offers a high degree of flexibility and performance for quality products. To compensate efficiently, the fluctuations may appear in production series; a flexible control system is designed to adjust production for large number of items or for various models of processing. The control equipment dedicated to nanotechnologies developed by INCDMTM Bucharest offers solutions for automation processes adapted to various operations and for quick response occurring in nano-production. A modular special design offers flexibility during the process, handling and interoperable ones, along with the possibility of changes facilitated by software that controls the entire verification process and parameter selection for each checked item’s admissibility

Dynamics at the nanoscale

However fascinating structures may be at the nanoscale, time-dependent behaviour at the nanoscale has far greater importance. Some of the dynamics is random, with fluctuations controlling rate processes and making thermal ratchets possible. Some of the dynamics causes the transfer of energy, of signals, or of charge. Such transfers are especially efficiently controlled in biological systems. Other dynamical processes occur when we wish to control the nanoscale, e.g., to avoid local failures of gate dielectrics, or to manipulate structures by electronic excitation, to use spin manipulation in quantum information processing. Our prime purpose is to make clear the enormous range and variety of time-dependent nanoscale phenomena. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Workshop on Advanced Technologies for Planetary Instruments, part 1

This meeting was conceived in response to new challenges facing NASA's robotic solar system exploration program. This volume contains papers presented at the Workshop on Advanced Technologies for Planetary Instruments on 28-30 Apr. 1993. This meeting was conceived in response to new challenges facing NASA's robotic solar system exploration program. Over the past several years, SDIO has sponsored a significant technology development program aimed, in part, at the production of instruments with these characteristics. This workshop provided an opportunity for specialists from the planetary science and DoD communities to establish contacts, to explore common technical ground in an open forum, and more specifically, to discuss the applicability of SDIO's technology base to planetary science instruments

Microgravity: A Teacher's Guide With Activities in Science, Mathematics, and Technology

The purpose of this curriculum supplement guide is to define and explain microgravity and show how microgravity can help us learn about the phenomena of our world. The front section of the guide is designed to provide teachers of science, mathematics, and technology at many levels with a foundation in microgravity science and applications. It begins with background information for the teacher on what microgravity is and how it is created. This is followed with information on the domains of microgravity science research; biotechnology, combustion science, fluid physics, fundamental physics, materials science, and microgravity research geared toward exploration. The background section concludes with a history of microgravity research and the expectations microgravity scientists have for research on the International Space Station. Finally, the guide concludes with a suggested reading list, NASA educational resources including electronic resources, and an evaluation questionnaire

The validation of acoustic environment simulator to determine the relationship between sound objects and soundscape

An acoustic environment simulator is a system that facilitates acoustic environment composition by controlling the parameters of sound objects (both background and sound events), allowing the user to compose and compare soundscapes against their expectations. By using the acoustic environment simulator, data regarding parameters of sound objects, such as their sound level and selection, can be obtained. Furthermore, these data can be used to understand the relationship between the sound objects and the soundscapes. This paper describes the development and validation of an acoustic environment simulator, which can be used to design a complex acoustic environment in the laboratory according to the expectations of the user. Validation of the simulated soundscape, whether the composed acoustic environment has the same soundscape dimension characteristics as previous in-situ and other laboratory experiments, was conducted by reproducing acoustic environment compositions using a two-dimensional ambisonic system in the laboratory. Listener responses on semantic differential scales were reduced to three reliable soundscape dimensions by principal component analysis: Calmness/Relaxation (40%), Dynamics/Vibrancy (12%), and Communication (11%). These three soundscape dimensions are consistent with a previous study conducted in situ. The results reported here indicate that acoustic environment composition can successfully imitate the soundscape dimensions of an actual acoustic environment