Grammatical Robotic Fabrication: Introducing A Grammar for Programming Real-Time Interaction among Human, Robot and Material

In architecture and design, robotic fabrication has opened up new design opportunities because it enables designers to investigate materials by versatile mechanical manipulations at various scales. The typical robotic fabrication is one-directional as that commences from the digital modeling of a predefined form to its fabrication. The requirement of digital modeling restricts the creative design space of fabrication to what can be simulated. Moreover, because digital models are based on simulating highly predictable material behaviour, one-directional fabrication workflow is limited in responding to unpredictable/emergent changes in the material. Lastly, because the planning and execution of the fabrication process require modeling and programming, the accessibility of digital fabrication is limited to expert users. Instead of this one-directional and material-agnostic fabrication design, this research introduces grammatical robotic fabrication as the core paradigm. Grammatical robotic fabrication investigates creativity, responsiveness and accessibility by facilitating iterative interaction among designer, robot, and material agents. This research's main contribution is a declarative programming language grammar. This grammar enables the encoding of rules that capture human, robot and material input/output and relate those with each other. The rules then establish three continuous interaction cycles: human-material, material-robot and human-robot interaction. In this thesis, firstly human-material interaction was explored in terms of creativity. The human-material interaction allows an iterative and reflective fabrication process through which appearing material outcomes inspire design ideas. Secondly, the potential of rules to integrate real-time sensor feedback was investigated. The results demonstrated how real-time sensor data from material and/or robot enabled the design exploration with the material agency. Based on the sensor feedback from the material, a material-robot interaction cycle was established. This cycle allowed a responsive robotic fabrication process as the robot program was continually (re)computed based on changes in the material. Accordingly, final design forms were generated physically `with' material, instead of being digitally modelled or programmed beforehand. The next investigations focused on human-robot interaction by replacing feedback from material with human agents. As a result, the designer was able to improvisationally influence the fabrication process and to immediately see material outcomes without programming or 3d-modeling. Consequently, emergent material outcomes were explored as part of form-finding. Based on the overall results, grammatical robotic fabrication introduces a transformation of digital fabrication into an iterative design process, thereby bringing digital fabrication a step closer to crafting, where most of the knowledge is acquired by interacting materials and tools. Different from crafting, during the fabrication process, the designer relates their design preferences with the affordances/constraints of robot setup and material by rules. Consequently, the digital fabrication knowledge builds up in parallel with the rules and becomes mapped with these rules. Accordingly, the digital fabrication knowledge was represented via rule diagrams, rule notations and semantic graphs. The results show these representations potentially enable both novice and expert designers to access digital fabrication knowledge without the necessity of sharing codes or in-person explanations. This thesis contributes to deepening and broadening current discussions about creativity, responsiveness and accessibility in the fields of robotic fabrication, computational making, and human-computer interaction. These contributions not only open new design opportunities with the material agency but also provide a generalisable workflow that structures responsive and improvisational robotic fabrication. This generalisable workflow of grammatical robotic fabrication poses a potential for more transparent data collection by representing digital fabrication knowledge. The grammatical robotic fabrication paradigm forms the preliminary step towards making human-fabrication collaboration possible for solving open-ended and uncertain tasks in application fields ranging from product to construction scale. In future, the grammatical robotic fabrication paradigm potentially supports the development of smart systems that can co-act with humans, not only by guiding but also by suggesting new opportunities.

Publication year:2023

Accessibility:Embargoed