European researchers have developed an autonomous excavator which has constructed a 6m high dry stone wall
Bob the Builder and his team would be proud.
While the famous television character did have talking equipment, the real world hasn’t quite managed conversational machinery just yet.
Researchers have, however, taught an autonomous excavator to construct dry stone walls all on its own using boulders weighing several tonnes and other demolition debris.
In non-commercial markets, handmade products are all the rage.
Building dry stone walls involves vast amounts of manual labour, thus making the by-hand method inefficient, timely, and costly for farmers and the construction industry.
A multidisciplinary team of researchers at ETH Zurich, a public university in Switzerland, has developed a method of using an autonomous excavator, called HEAP, to construct a permanent retaining dry stone wall that is 6m high and 65m long.
The wall is embedded in a digitally planned and autonomously excavated landscape and park.
Swiss scientists and engineers developed this innovative design application as part of the National Centre of Competence in Research for Digital Fabrication.
Dry stone walls are resource efficient as they use locally sourced and irregularly abundant materials, including concrete slabs that are low in embodied energy, meaning a more sustainable structure.
HEAP – which stands for Hydraulic Excavator for an Autonomous Purpose – is sensitive to its area’s surroundings.
Using sensors, HEAP can autonomously draw a 3D map of the construction site, localising existing building blocks and stones for the wall’s construction.
The specially designed tools and machine vision capabilities enable the excavator to scan and grab large stones in its immediate environment.
Using its own centre of gravity, the autobot can even calculate the stone’s approximate weight.
Encoded into the machine, an algorithm anticipates the best possible position for each rock. It can then conduct the task independently by placing the stones in their given desired location, accordingly.
This one autonomous machine can place 20-30 large stones in a single consignment, which is about as many as one delivery can supply.