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A paper by U.K. and Hong Kong researchers looks at the development of robotic systems that can take apart existing prefabricated building modules and put them back together in different configurations. The authors think this technology could help address a big barrier to uptake of prefabrication in custom building and renovation: the difficulty of changing designs for particular projects or mid-project.
From the abstract: This study presents a Robotic Prefabrication System (RPS) which employs a new concept called “re-fabrication”: the automatic disassembly of a prefabricated structure and its reconstruction according to a new design. The RPS consists of a software module and a hardware module. First, the software employs the 3D model of a prefabricated structure as input, and returns motor control command output to the hardware. There are two underlying algorithms developed in the software module. First, a novel algorithm automatically compares the old and new models and identifies the components which the two models do not have in common in order to enable disassembly of the original structure and its refabrication into the new design. In addition, an additional novel algorithm computes the optimal refabrication sequence to transform one model into another according to the differences identified. Meanwhile, the hardware module takes the motor control commands as input and executes the appropriate assembly/disassembly operations, and returns the desired refabricated structure in real-time. Validation tests on two lab-scaled prefabricated structures demonstrate that the system successfully generated the desired refabrication sequences and performed all assembly operations with acceptable placement precision.