The Hive was designed and constructed over the course of 3 days by the a collaboration of robotics and Autodesk University attendees to create a architectural structure with computer controlled LEDs. The project was designed by the Office the CTO (OCTO) including my colleagues Maurice Conti, Evan Atherton, Heather Kerrick, David Thomasson and several others including members of Autodesk Research.
Hive is an architectural scale pavilion designed and built through human and robot collaboration during three days, with participation from attendees at Autodesk University 2015. This multi-disciplinary project explores future-of-design themes such as: emergent design, wearables, internet of things, human-robot interaction, and interactive indoor positioning systems.
Some of the big goals were to:
- Demonstrate an alternative to the “robots will take our jobs” narrative by getting humans and robots to work together to build something that could not be done by either species alone
- To use naturally varying bamboo to explore how well computation and the robot arms can handle variation and uncertainty (instead of doing the same exact movement over and over like typical factories)
- Use more user-friendly interfaces so that people without experience with robotics or coding can participate and control the robots.
Hyperlapse video created by Evan Troxel. https://youtu.be/kc7GuJhLAWE
Thank you Evan Troxel for sharing the video!
More about the AU Hive
Humans and Robots Collaborating at Autodesk University
“Visitors to Autodesk University 2015 are invited to work with a robot through wearables and internet of things technologies to help build a 12′ high architectural pavilion using bamboo.
The hive will be created from 224 tensegrity units. Each tensegrity unity is composed of three bamboo rods held together with string that is wound by robotic arms. The magical part is that the bamboo rods are not touching each other. Each tensegrity unit is unique due to the bamboo rods having differences in length and diameter. They are connected together with special LED units that help the builders place the pieces and will create a light show.“
As a bonus here is what the Hive looked like as we took is apart to return and recycle all the parts.
