The Digital Construction Platform (DCP) by the  Mediated Matter group has been featured as the cover story in the April issue of the journal Science Robotics, the latest journal in the Science family.

The DCP is a mobile robot that explores on-site architectural-scale construction and autonomous self-sufficiency. The creation of the DCP was motivated by the vision behind The Mediated Matter Group for designing buildings without parts and processes without partitions. This approach embodies a shift from the machine age to the biological age, from considering the building as a machine to live in, to the building as an organism—computationally grown, additively manufactured, adapted to the environment, and possibly biologically augmented in the future.

The Science Robotics article showcases the researchers' work developing the DCP, and leveraging it to fabricate a 14.6 m diameter, 3.7 m tall open dome structure using Mediated Matter's patent-pending Print-in-Place fabrication technique. The researchers examine the performance of the DCP system and Print-in-Place process in comparison with other automated construction techniques, and discuss paths toward self-sufficiency for systems like the DCP, through local materials sourcing, autonomous mobility, and environmental energy collection.

Credits:

Project Team: Steven Keating, Julian Leland, Veevee Cai, and Neri Oxman (group director).

Project Collaborators: The DCP project has been made possible through generous support from Google, Inc., Altec, Inc., Dow Chemical, and Autodesk, among others.