Robotics for Self-Organised Construction

Recent advances in material sciences and robotics promise a potential paradigm shift in the design and construction of human architecture. Inspired by nest constructions of social insects, architectural designs and constructions could arise from locally coordinated interactions of large numbers of robots. In order to achieve this goal, the algorithmic foundations of such processes need to be researched, these investigations' results need to be translated to productive systems, possibly first in the context of multi-physics simulations, and finally to actual, deployment-ready hardware systems. Important research steps are taken at all these levels of abstraction. In this paper, we present a brief survey of works that promote the deployment of self-organising robotic systems for the purpose of building construction. It focusses on the aspects of building materials (rigid and amorphous), deployed hardware (grounded and airborne) and the organisational realisation of the robots' coordination by means of stigmergic communication.