Neuron is a human-robot collaborative fabrication system that assembles space-frame structures from pre-cut steel bars through a continuous dialogue between a Universal Robot UR10e and a human welder. Developed as part of IAAC’s MRAC 3.1 Workshop under the guidance of Nacho Monereo, Prottay Roy Chowdhury, and guest artist María Mallo, the project explores what happens when human-in-the-loop manufacturing is treated not as a safety constraint, but as a structural necessity.
The project began with a simple question: how do we bring human-in-the-loop into robotic fabrication — not as supervision, but as a condition without which the system cannot function? We searched for an architecture that could satisfy four requirements: shared control, a handshake at every cycle, negotiated geometry, and a loop that halts without human input. We found the answer in our own biology. The human body is already a human-in-the-loop system — we function as sensors, but only through neurons firing signals across synapses. Intelligence emerges from the exchange. Our system mirrors this architecture: the robot is one neuron, the human is another, and the interfaces between them — the HTC Vive controller, the MediaPipe camera, the web dashboard — are the synapses that make the structure possible.
