Part of the design research “Swarm Robotics” thesis, developed at the AADRL
Architectural Design:
Felipe Sepúlveda + Sofia Papageorgiou + Saman Dadgostar + Akber KhanSWEATWORKS
Based on the argument that spatial and geometrical complexity is an issue of formation rather than form, the proposal constitutes a speculative design research for a prototypical autonomous system that employs the use of robots to create form and space. Conceived as social insects based upon the rules of stigmergic social hierarchies, the autonomous units organize themselves as an artificial social ecosystem that can be likened most to that of termite ecologies. Final structural and spatial formations are emergent results of stigmergic behavior resulting from the interaction of agents within the environment’s material and specific clustering logics utilized in order to best achieve their organizational and tectonic objectives. The system is not context-dependent but site-specific, as it could be deployed in a variety of loose-fill environments and land topologies. SWEATWORKS is conceived as an artificial ecosystem in which a large number of autonomous agents co-relate and organize themselves under specific operational setups. The need to organize a large amount of agents to perform individual tasks relates directly to the organizational logics of natural decentralized systems. As termite ecologies, the system is built upon stigmergic logics, as a non-linear/ global emergent system, determined by the local actuation of agents within them and their environment.