Development of an experimental platform for architectural-scale robotics : the Digital Construction Platform

This thesis describes the development and refinement of the second prototype of the Digital Construction Platform, or DCP. The DCP is a serial-link micro-macro manipulator robot intended for architectural-scale fabrication tasks, originally conceived of and presented by Keating in [1]. It is envisioned primarily as a platform for experimentation in automated construction, rather than as a closed, single-application system. In the work described here, a second prototype of the DCP -- referred to as the DCP v.2 -- was developed over two distinct periods. During the first period, from September 2015 through August 2016, the DCP v.2 system was assembled and a basic command and control architecture was developed to operate it. A series of experiments were conducted to examine the system's performance, including pose repeatability testing in accordance with the ISO 9283-1998 robot performance characterization standard; and the fabrication of an architectural-scale dome structure from spray polyurethane foam. During the second period, from September 2016 through August 2016, the DCP v.2 system and command/control architecture were modified in a variety of ways to improve performance, reliability, accessibility to new users, and adaptability to new tasks. These modifications included transition to a modular, hard-real-time control architecture; installation of additional sensor systems on the vehicle; and the refinement and standardization of the system's tool-path generation architecture. The impact of this work was demonstrated through a second set of demonstrations, including large-scale light paintings leveraging the new control architecture's capabilities; and re-characterization of the system's ISO 9283 pose repeatability, demonstrating a 59% improvement in this metric.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Bell, Julian Leland

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Neri Oxman and David L. Trumper.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113726

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/113726