The Flight Assembled Architecture installation: Cooperative construction with flying machines

The art installation Flight Assembled Architecture 1 is one of the first structures built by flying vehicles. Culminating in a 6-m-tall tower composed of 1500 foam modules (see Figures 1 and 2), the installation was assembled by four quadrocopters in 18 hours during a four-day-long live exhibition at the Fonds R?gional d'Art Contemporain (Regional Contemporary Art Fund) du Centre in Orl?ans, France. This article documents the design and development of specific elements of the autonomous system behind this one-of-a-kind installation and describes the process and challenges of bringing such a complex system out of the laboratory and into the public realm, where live demonstration and human-in-the-loop interaction demand high levels of robustness, dependability, and safety. The installation is a 1:100 scale model of what was originally conceived of as a 600 m-high vertical village (see "The Vertical Village" for details) and is an exploration of aerial construction in architecture. Architects have been exploring the use of digital technologies for the design and assembly of structures for some time now, and many facilities for investigating nonstandard architectural design and fabrication using industrial robots have sprung up in the past decade 2-4. However, robot arms and computer numerical control (CNC) machines are limited by predefined working areas that constrain the size of the workpiece they can act upon and are thus also limited in their scale of action to a small portion or component of the overall structure, or to model-sized fabrication 5. In contrast, flying machines are not constrained by such tight boundaries. The space that flying machines can act upon is substantially larger than the size of the machines themselves, making it feasible for the machines to work on the structure as a whole at a 1:1 scale, thus offering architects a new framework for realizing their designs.