Imagine you’re enjoying a beautiful summer day, relaxing in the heat of the sun. However, when the sun’s rays become a bit too hot, there’s a problem—there isn’t any shade in sight.
To help increase summer refuge, the University of Stuttgart has developed an interesting form of intelligent architecture. Controlled by drones, they’ve demoed an adaptive canopy that changes its shape as the sun moves throughout the day.
“The resulting architectural system is capable of autonomous rearrangement and stagnant operation driven by behavioral design patterns rather than a singular robotic assembly or construction method,” according to the research.
Known as the Cyber Physical Macro Materials project, the canopy uses a combination of programmable cyber physical macro material and aerial robotic construction. Lightweight carbon fiber filament combined with integration electronics for sensing, processing, and communication form the cyber physical material.
Task-specific unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) “builders” work with the canopy to create a structure that can continuously modify its configuration depending on the sun’s orientation.
“This physical flexibility and integrated intelligence enable new architectural behaviors that are capable of swiftly activating public spaces in defiance of traditionally lethargic building processes and regulations,” according to the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD).
Future improvements on this functional prototype include programming the existing framework using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
To learn more, read the research paper, “Cyber Physical Macro Material as a UAV [re]Configurable Architectural System,” published in the Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art and Design 2018.
You can catch a glimpse of the system in action in the video below.