TERMES Project
Graduate students at Harvard have an interesting approach to incorporating robotics in the construction industry. Many scientists have always suggested looking at nature when trying to find elegant and effective solutions to problems present in our lives. One such problem is the necessity of an overseer with large-scale projects. These managers are a large cost to projects because of their expertise and skills. Their ability to direct precisely and solve problems on the fly makes them an expensive but needed asset to a construction team. If there were a way to achieve the same results without this oversight, construction costs could be lowered. Programmed robots working on a construction project also need direction in order …show more content…
Their project, call TERMES, is a simple robot that functions independently of all other robots in the vicinity, Figure 2 (Nagpal, Radhika). It does not care if it is the only robot or if there are 300 of them working on a project because it builds independently without any communication entering or leaving that robot. Using only 4 sensors and 3 actuators, the simple robot has very few parts to maintain making an extremely reliable machine. For the sake of proving the power of these robots, the robots and blocks were built in parallel allowing the robots ability to move the foam blocks to not play a large role in the …show more content…
The robot builds following this basic process: The robot retrieves a block from a known location. The robot follows a predetermined path to the jobsite, looks for blocks in the area and other robots in the way. It creates steps as it goes in order to reach parts of the structure that are high up. When it has reached the level that the next block needs to be located it lowers that block and repeats the steps (Perry, Caroline). With these simple rules to follow as well as knowing the end result, the robots can work independently to finish the task. It can be argued that these robots do have a so-called blueprint programmed in, but they really do not. The robots do not have a defined step-by-step process programmed; the entirely of the work is independent and the final image is used solely to determine where the next foam block needs to be placed, but this decision is determined onboard.
One incredible advantage to this independently orchestrated construction project is the ability of each robot to check the work of the last. If a mistake is made in the process, the next robot will find the mistake as it is completing its own task (Perry, Caroline). That robot can amend the mistake before it propagates throughout the project. If this mistake were created by poor direction from a project manager, this mistake may have never been caught. Without this single point failure, projects have
Graduate students at Harvard have an interesting approach to incorporating robotics in the construction industry. Many scientists have always suggested looking at nature when trying to find elegant and effective solutions to problems present in our lives. One such problem is the necessity of an overseer with large-scale projects. These managers are a large cost to projects because of their expertise and skills. Their ability to direct precisely and solve problems on the fly makes them an expensive but needed asset to a construction team. If there were a way to achieve the same results without this oversight, construction costs could be lowered. Programmed robots working on a construction project also need direction in order …show more content…
Their project, call TERMES, is a simple robot that functions independently of all other robots in the vicinity, Figure 2 (Nagpal, Radhika). It does not care if it is the only robot or if there are 300 of them working on a project because it builds independently without any communication entering or leaving that robot. Using only 4 sensors and 3 actuators, the simple robot has very few parts to maintain making an extremely reliable machine. For the sake of proving the power of these robots, the robots and blocks were built in parallel allowing the robots ability to move the foam blocks to not play a large role in the …show more content…
The robot builds following this basic process: The robot retrieves a block from a known location. The robot follows a predetermined path to the jobsite, looks for blocks in the area and other robots in the way. It creates steps as it goes in order to reach parts of the structure that are high up. When it has reached the level that the next block needs to be located it lowers that block and repeats the steps (Perry, Caroline). With these simple rules to follow as well as knowing the end result, the robots can work independently to finish the task. It can be argued that these robots do have a so-called blueprint programmed in, but they really do not. The robots do not have a defined step-by-step process programmed; the entirely of the work is independent and the final image is used solely to determine where the next foam block needs to be placed, but this decision is determined onboard.
One incredible advantage to this independently orchestrated construction project is the ability of each robot to check the work of the last. If a mistake is made in the process, the next robot will find the mistake as it is completing its own task (Perry, Caroline). That robot can amend the mistake before it propagates throughout the project. If this mistake were created by poor direction from a project manager, this mistake may have never been caught. Without this single point failure, projects have