Timber system with robotic milling and AR-guided assembly for reconfiguration

Abstract Timber’s reusability and precision make it well suited to modular construction, yet reconfigurable structures require close integration of design, fabrication, and assembly. In practice, coordinating joinery geometry, fabrication tolerance, and assembly guidance remains difficult in digital timber workflows. This study presents a tolerance-aware workflow linking computational design of mortise–tenon joints with robotic CNC milling and augmented reality (AR)-based assembly guidance. A rule-based design grammar encodes reversible mortise–tenon connections and calibrated offsets, producing joints with a consistent 0.25 mm clearance for friction-fit assembly. The digital pipeline translates these parameters into robotic toolpaths and stepwise AR instructions in an immersive 360-degree visualization environment. Virtual overlays guide the sequential placement of discrete timber blocks, improving alignment accuracy and eliminating mechanical fasteners or adhesives. A full-scale timber wall prototype was fabricated and repeatedly assembled, disassembled, and reconfigured. The joints consistently reached full engagement using light manual tapping without noticeable degradation of fit. The experiments show that calibrated tolerances support robotic fabrication accuracy and repeated assembly. The results indicate that calibrated joinery, robotic milling, and augmented-reality guidance can form a coherent parametric-to-physical process for precise, low-waste, and reconfigurable timber construction that clarifies dependencies between design parameters, fabrication tolerances, and assembly procedures.