The Rapid Clay Formations project implements an in-situ robotic fabrication process for building with expressive soft clay bonds by robotically compressing clay cylinders at a large scale. The project makes use of accurate robotic positioning, spatial orientation, and controlled pressing of clay cylinders to form interlocking aggregations. It uses computational design and fabrication strategies to arrive at a sustainable construction technique as an alternative to labor-intensive rammed earth structures.

In a prelimiray 10-week design research workshop where students of the MAS ETH DFAB, together with researchers of Gramazio Kohler Research, were able to develop an apposite earthen material mix for the cylinders and a series of fabrication- and material-aware computational design strategies. The team implemented robotic processes that allowed building at full-scale and set up the tooling for controlling the robotic end-effector for picking, placing, and pressing the clay cylinders onto the main wall structure.

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the student team:

Maria Pia Assaf, Jomana Baddad, Frederic Brisson, Yu-Hung Chiu, Rémy Clemente, Ioulios Georgiou, Mahiro Goto, Anton T Johansson, Laszlo Mangliar, Dinorah Martinez Schulte, Edurne Morales Zuniga, Fatemeh Salehi Amiri, Emmanuelle Sallin, Indra Santosa, Eliott Sounigo, Chanon Techathuvanun, Ping-Hsun Tsai