A swarm of robots working flawlessly in tandem have successfully built a beautiful undulating tower in a warehouse outside of Paris. The world’s first building built by flying robots was designed by architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler of Gramazio & Kohler, and it was assembled in a matter of days by levitating robots engineered and built by ETH Zurich. The installation, entitled Flight Assembled Architecture, was built in an art space called FRAC – check out a video of the process after the jump!
The tower was built by an army of robots that seamlessly worked together with the help of a group of motion cameras installed in the ceiling of the art space to place the bricks in order one by one until the tower was built. The robots each have a suction device on their underbelly that grabs onto bricks and allows the robots to fly with them. When a robot gets tired it automatically plugs itself into a charger to juice up while another robot taps in and takes its place.
“This,” Raffaello D’Andrea, the robotocist in charge of the project told NPR, is the “first installation to be built by flying machines.” The tower is built from 1,500 polystyrene bricks and measures 20 feet tall by 11 feet wide. The FRAC gallery space where the tower was erected was founded in part by France’s Ministry of Culture, FRAC stands for Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain, a regional fund for contemporary art. The exhibit started in December and runs to the middle of February.