Construction robot builds massive stone walls on its own
A robotic construction vehicle can use 3D digital mapping and AI to learn the best placement for each stone in a wall, without instruction from a human
By Jeremy Hsu
22 November 2023
A robotic construction vehicle picks and scans each boulder to determine where it fits in a stone wall
Marc Schneider
An autonomous robot with a large gripper can transform a pile of boulders into huge stone walls without mortar – learning on its own how to place each irregularly-shaped stone as the next building block.
The robotic excavator has built a stone wall 6 metres high and 65 metres long through a public park on the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland. It also used a large shovel to autonomously landscape the park’s terrain into terraces.
“This is the first work to apply such a robotic excavator for the large-scale construction of permanent dry stone walls,” says Ryan Luke Johns at ETH Zürich in Switzerland.
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Johns and his colleagues equipped the robot with lidar, which employs lasers to measure distances, so it could create its own 3D map of a construction site. They also trained several artificial intelligence models to help the robot figure out the best way to grasp and place individual stones.
Once the robot knows the location of each large stone based on the digital map, it grasps the rock, digitally scans it and determines its weight to get a better sense of how it may fit into the eventual wall.
