Architecture Students Learning About Robots in Construction

Robotics have been part of NJIT engineering curricula for many years, and now the invasion is encroaching on architecture majors, too.

It's important for architects to learn about the abilities and limitations of robots, experts say, because the assembly processes and visual appearance of buildings could be planned differently if the construction workers are metal-and-silicon instead of flesh-and-blood.

Professor Andrzej Zarzycki, in the Hillier College of Architecture and Design, is having students learn with a seven-axis robot arm called the IRB 4600. It's made by a company in Zurich called ABB Ltd. and arrived in Newark a few years ago, but it took time for the right faculty and the right laboratory space to be ready.

Programming the robot, which one Hillier official nicknamed Bob, is not unlike operating a Lego Mindstorms kit. A key difference is the industrial system costs north of $100,000 to acquire and install, runs on 600 volts and in the wrong hands could damage property or cause bodily harm.

Students use computerized drafting software called Rhino. A visual coding editor is called Grasshopper and there's a middle layer known as Taco which provides ABB-specific connections. (Taco got its name as a joke about feeding the rhino, one of its developers stated.)

The first thing students learn is safety. There is a wooden fence surrounding the robot area to keep out curious onlookers. When the arm is in manual mode, users must keep their finger on its trigger within a certain range of pressure. If the trigger is held too loosely or too firmly, then the arm immediately stops. It's designed that way from the manufacturer, Zarzycki observed, because in an emergency humans tend to either let go or squeeze harder.

Students in Zarzycki's design studio course are building a smorgasbord of attachments for the arm. These are known as end effectors in robotics lingo. They are essentially interchangeable hands for various manufacturing tasks such as picking-and-placing, milling, drawing, or even three-dimensional printing.

As architects, "The tools impact the work you do," Zarzycki observed. He cited an example from the automotive industry, where modern cars are faster and more reliable than vintage ones, largely due to improvements in tooling. Construction is heading in the same direction, he said, but it's going at a much slower pace due to the scale and safety concerns of making a home or commercial building compared to a car.

Fourth-year architecture students William Hall, Meraj Nasi and Jalaysia Stevenson designed an effector that sorts bricks. It identifies the right bricks by using a color sensor and stacks them into neatly arranged piles by using a pneumatic gripper.

"The path to creating this attachment was a tough one," Nasi said. "We ran into a lot of difficulties as a team including but not limited to issues with programming, issues with the brick releasing on its own and issues with the placement being completely off."

Stevenson elaborated on their technical challenges. "We ran into a lot of measurement issues with the attachment pieces and had to constantly keep printing out drawings and 3D printing the pieces to make sure everything aligned properly," she said. They had to enter a lot of code manually due to software limitations and inexperience with the system. 

Stevenson took some programming courses before working with the robot, but Nasi had no coding experience before taking Zarzycki's course. Now, they both said they can imagine using robotics in their careers.

Another group of students built a clay extruder. They learned how moving the robot arm at different speeds impacted how fast the clay came out and whether it stayed still or moved too much, just like decorating a cake with an icing tip. They also had to learn which types and consistencies of clay worked best. Air pockets and water were other factors. That team consisted of fifth-year students John Braun, Renzo Eseo and David Skup.

The brick sorter and clay extruder are just two of several student designs. Zarzycki has a special fondness for this subject. He's on the editorial board of a journal called Technology Architecture + Design which formed in 2016. He hopes that his course could be the start of a trend, where NJIT would be a leader in teaching future architects about autonomous construction and intelligent buildings.

"My robotics teaching will continue looking at autonomous construction and assembly processes, with a particular focus on mass customization of facade components and new material applications. I also plan to expand teaching of robotic technologies into areas outside of construction and combine them with concepts of smart buildings. I feel that this is a particularly unexplored area within architecture," he said.

"I would like to investigate how robots can become a new group of building occupants and urban dwellers. We see an increased interest from industries on developing robots that clean houses, wash windows, mow lawns or help mobility-impaired people. Currently, architects hardly even ask questions about what is required of a built environment to facilitate these new functionalities. What is needed to make buildings a robot-friendly environment that enhances human occupant lives?"

Zarzycki said he and a colleague, Mathew Schwartz, are researching the effects of various building materials on the vision sensors used by robots. Robotics, he said, needs to be taken seriously by designers and architects — "It's a different form of evolution," he noted. "It's nice that we are part of it as humans."