The Master in Robotics and Advanced Construction (MRAC) seeks to train a new generation of interdisciplinary professionals who are capable of facing our growing need for a more sustainable and optimised construction ecosystem. The Master is focused on the emerging design and market opportunities arising from novel robotic and advanced manufacturing systems.
Through a mixture of seminars, workshops, and studio projects, the master programme challenges the traditional processes in the Construction Sector. It investigates how advances in robotics and digital fabrication tools change the way we build and develop processes and design tools for such new production methods.
Process Overview Material Disassembly Material Evaluation & Design Generative Assembly Human Visual Inspection Manual Damage Categorization First Steps First approaches or manual Assembly AI-Based Evaluation Stack 2_Brick 0 We noticed inconsistencies in the evaluation results. After finalizing the prompt, we ran the test twice for each brick, averaged the two values, and visualized the results … Read more
The construction industry remains one of the least digitized sectors globally, yet it manages a $177 trillion market. Despite this massive scale, approximately 12–20% of total project costs are routinely lost to rework, largely driven by discrepancies between design plans and as-built site conditions. As a proposal developed for our Software II course, we present … Read more
Circular Intelligence for Robotic Classification & Upcycling of Industrial Timber How can robotic system identify, measure and sort reusable construction materials based on predefined constraints? This project proposes a vision-guided robotic system for supporting the reuse of construction materials through automated detection, analysis, and manipulation. A fixed RGB camera in an eye-to-hand configuration observes a … Read more
Collaboration with University of Linz Data to Motion: using PCA to represent laughter in a cup The idea for our project was to capture the laughter shared in simple moments of joy and then use the data captured to edify and create vessels which would reflect these memories in their form. The first conceptual proposal … Read more
How can robots reach trash and recycle it? What components are we using? What is the system process? Main system
In the following blog post, we will analyse the development of the concept of our project carried out in Workshop 2.1. Team Collaborative Workflow and Modular System Development Guide, in which a Rotatory Gantry structure is proposed for the flip-type movement of a robotic arm. AIRFLIP – Rotary Gantry System for Small-Scale Cobots Overview The … Read more
This project was developed within the framework of MRAC Workshop 2.1: Team Collaborative Workflow and Modular System Development. The workshop focuses on learning, internalizing, and applying collaborative software development practices using Git and GitHub through the development of a modular robotic system. In this context, the group was tasked with designing and implementing a robotic … Read more
Robotic Coin Toss — Workshop Context This project was developed within the framework of MRAC Workshop 2.1, a hands-on workshop focused on collaborative workflows and modular system development in robotics. The workshop emphasizes not only technical experimentation, but also the process of working as a team using shared digital tools, version control, and structured documentation. As … Read more
Non Planar Strategies for Robotic Polymer 3D Printing: Translating Digital Realms into Large-Scale Architectural Elements to Reimagine Ornament and Material Expression.
Oriol Carrasco – Anomaly.Build Oriol Carrasco is a PhD architect from Barcelona. He is a senior fabrication expert at IAAC with extensive expertise in composite manufacturing. Oriol currently teaches in MAA and 3DpA programs. He has been co-leading the Design with Nature research line since 2013, teaching now in the metabolic introductory studio. He has … Read more
In her lecture titled Circular Matter, Areti Markopoulou examined the urgent transition from a linear to a circular paradigm within the built environment. She began by outlining the structural problems embedded in today’s construction industry, which relies heavily on resource-intensive, difficult-to-recover materials. As cities continue to expand, this linear “extract–manufacture–use–discard” model has become environmentally unsustainable. Markopoulou … Read more
“Anatomy of a Machine: SHAPE” is a research project from the MRAC program that seeks to integrate knowledge from previous explorations in spill and strokes. To achieve shape, clay stamping was selected as the primary fabrication tool, establishing a 40x40cm working area as the base for experimentation. The project investigates how precise robotic movements—varying position, … Read more
This article presents our Workshop 1.2 project, which focuses on analyzing data and translating it into robotic movements to control an ABB IRB 6700-150/3.20 industrial robot equipped with a plastic pellet extruder for additive manufacturing. The core concept of the project involved studying the tsunami-related terrain and displacement data, extracting spatial and intensity-based information to … Read more
Context This exercise explores robotic fabrication processes through the direct manipulation of malleable materials. The assignment consisted of producing a 2.5D clay piece, measuring 40 × 40 cm with a maximum height of 5 cm, understood as a physical result of a robotically applied force on soft matter.Rather than designing a predefined form, the goal … Read more
Anatomy of the Machine: Impact Printing abc What is Impact printing? Whilst clay has been used as a construction method for thousands of years, with evidence of buildings dating back to as early as 9000-10,000 BC in Mesopotamia, impact printing is a extremely modern take of the additive construction process. Research particuarly at ETH Zurich … Read more
Introduction In Anatomy of a Machine: Spill, we designed and built our own paint-spilling tools and worked with large robotic arms to create expressive, A0-scale paintings. Over the weeks, we tested movements with our hands, translated them into robotic trajectories, and refined both the tools and the resulting spill patterns. Using Arduino and laser-cut acrylic … Read more
