In addition to our regular Seminar Series, the Robotics Institute is launching the Dialogue Series. Two speakers will each present on a related topic and engage in a dialogue with each other and the audience.

Friday, March 26, 2021 at 1pm – 2:30pm ET

Robotics in Fabrication and Construction

moderated by Maria Yablonina

Kathrin Dörfler: Human in the loop – How human-robot collaboration will shape the future of digital fabrication
Contrary to the vision of a fully automated building design and robotized construction, the idea of a hybrid, mutually augmented human-robot work team could form the basis of a paradigm shift in the field of architecture and digital fabrication. This talk will provide insights into how such hybrid design and fabrication chains could have the potential to use machine intelligence and robot capacities while at the same time involving the participatory engagement of humans and thus creating mutual gain.

Brian Ringley: A future of field robotics in construction
We have entered the age of agile mobile robotics in construction, the missing piece in the job site data tech stack that overcomes current limitations of static sensors, aerial drones, and wheeled/tracked ground vehicles for unsupervised and repeatable interior capture at scale. Brian Ringley will detail use cases across the project delivery lifecycle, delving into where autonomy is possible, where it is valuable, and where it is even desirable, ultimately framing the indispensability of human labor in the emerging context of heterogeneous robot fleets.
 

Bios: 
Kathrin Dörfler is Assistant Professor for Digital Fabrication and leads the Augmented Fabrication Lab at TU Munich, Germany, where she investigates the reciprocal symbiosis of humans and machines in architecture and building design. She holds a PhD from ETH Zurich (Gramazio Kohler Research and NCCR Digital Fabrication), and a Master of Architecture from the TU Vienna.

Brian Ringley is a construction technologist at Boston Dynamics where he promotes new value-add autonomous capabilities for construction project delivery and works to expand the construction application ecosystem with the Spot SDK. Prior to Boston Dynamics, he was a Senior Construction Automation Researcher at WeWork where he managed the construction robotics research program and contributed to initiatives in design automation, unitized prefabrication, and construction site progress monitoring. He has also taught architecture courses for many years, most recently at Pratt GAUD where he led seminars in computational fabrication and industrial robotic automation for industrialized construction.