Abstract
Augmented bricklaying explores the manual construction of intricate brickwork through visual augmentation, and applies and validates the concept in a real-scale building project—a fair-faced brickwork facade for a winery in Greece. As shown in previous research, robotic systems have proven to be very suitable to achieve various differentiated brickwork designs with high efficiency but show certain limitations, for example, in regard to spatial freedom or the usage of mortar on site. Hence, this research aims to show that through the use of a craft-specific augmented reality system, the same geometric complexity and precision seen in robotic fabrication can be achieved with an augmented manual process. Towards this aim, a custom-built augmented reality system for in situ construction was established. This process allows bricklayers to not depend on physical templates, and it enables enhanced spatial freedom, preserving and capitalizing on the bricklayer’s craft of mortar handling. In extension to conventional holographic representations seen in current augmented reality fabrication processes that have limited context-awareness and insufficient geometric feedback capabilities, this system is based on an object-based visual–inertial tracking method to achieve dynamic optical guidance for bricklayers with real-time tracking and highly precise 3D registration features in on-site conditions. By integrating findings from the field of human–computer interfaces and human–machine communication, this research establishes, explores, and validates a human–computer interactive fabrication system, in which explicit machine operations and implicit craftsmanship knowledge are combined. In addition to the overall concept, the method of implementation, and the description of the project application, this paper also quantifies process parameters of the applied augmented reality assembly method concerning building accuracy and assembly speed. In the outlook, this paper aims to outline future directions and potential application areas of object-aware augmented reality systems and their implications for architecture and digital fabrication.
Highlights
The high environmental impact of the construction sector and the perceived lack of increased productivity underscore the interest and investment in the development of digital fabrication technologies for the innovation of construction processes
It is connected to the camera and inertial measurement unit (IMU) and communicates via Ethernet through ROS (Quigley et al 2015) with the second laptop, which is solely used for visualization (Fig.3: 5)
The average time per brick after a learning and adjustment period with the custom augmented reality system was measured at 3 min/brick, which equals three times the amount of straight fair-faced brick masonry without rotation or vertical movement
Summary
The high environmental impact of the construction sector and the perceived lack of increased productivity underscore the interest and investment in the development of digital fabrication technologies for the innovation of construction processes. A stream of research has emerged in architecture, recognizing the high diversity of tasks associated with the domain of architecture and construction (Vasey et al 2016). This stream foresees a digital building construction methodology, where skilled workers and machines will share diverse tasks in the same work environment and collaborate towards common goals, combining the best of both their strengths and still fully exploiting a digital design-to-production-workflow (Stock et al 2018). The concept of human–machine interaction is of increasing interest for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry as well as the academic community to achieve higher performance as well as enable socially sustainable semi-autonomous concepts and robotic processes (Ejiri 1996)
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