Autonomous Big-Scale Additive Manufacturing Using Cable-Driven Robots

Cable-driven parallel robots are a rather novel robotic system, with an advantage over traditional system in not occupying the ground level as it operates from the top down. This paper presents a possibility of additive construction similar to 3D printing at the scale of building parts or at house-size. This can be achieved by stacking elements as well as using a concrete-printing head. For this, a demonstrator is developed that is controlled by an architectural parametric tool that imports the design, checks the size/building limits/cable conflicts, creates paths, simulates the building process, and sends out the G-code to the robot. The goal is to use this robotic system on building sites as a flexible easy-to-use construction robot or for prefabrication purposes.