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Visions of Process—Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics in Architectural Design and Construction

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Robotic Building

Part of the book series: Springer Series in Adaptive Environments ((SPSADENV))

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Abstract

This chapter discusses and reviews the application of swarm intelligence (SI) and swarm robotics (SR) to architecture and construction from a history of science and technology perspective. In a first step, it explores the conceptual entanglements of swarm intelligence and adaptive environments and situates them in the context of a recent theoretical discourse about “media ecologies”. The second part provides a critical overview of seminal SI approaches for architectural design. These scrutinize novel connections between architecture as a site of material composition and as a site of spatial practices by computer experiments in software environments. Its guiding hypothesis is that SI technologies here are primarily used to create diversity. Subsequently, the third part of the chapter examines in which ways recent advances in collective robotics lead to further materializations of the adaptive capabilities of swarming that go beyond software applications. It presents three state-of-the-art examples of SR for architectural construction and demonstrates that SR in architectural construction—in contrast to the paradigm of diversity discussed in the context of architectural design—work best in context with a high degree of standardization and pre-defined modularization, or, on the basis of regularity.

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Acknowledgements

The author wants to express his gratitude to Florian Sprenger (Frankfurt) for discussing parts of his forthcoming monograph on an epistemology of environmental knowledge in a research colloquium at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2016. He also thanks Sophie Godding and Rahel Schnitter (MECS Lüneburg) for their help with copy-editing this chapter.

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  1. Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany

    Sebastian Vehlken

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    Henriette Bier

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Vehlken, S. (2018). Visions of Process—Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics in Architectural Design and Construction. In: Bier, H. (eds) Robotic Building. Springer Series in Adaptive Environments. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70866-9_1

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