Aerial Repair and Aerial Additive Manufacturing (2023-12)¶

Construction is the core action for human habitation and shelter production. Access to these fundamental needs matures through the essential characteristics of the construction methods, such as pace, suppleness, and cost. These features also challenge the access and build envelope of construction in hard-to-reach areas and extreme environments. In addition, workers’ health is at stake considering the dynamic and risky nature of construction sites and these conventional construction tasks. Therefore, research on robotic-based construction systems is experiencing substantial growth because of the promising potential of response to these deficiencies [Tay et al., 2017; Delgado et al., 2019]. The robotic construction field’s lead research area is onsite and off-site continuous and discrete (such as brick-laying) additive manufacturing processes that use ground-based static or mobile robotic systems. Hence, it is possible to find the equivalents of these applications in industry as well as in intensive studies in universities. Figure 17.1 demonstrates the main categories ofthe robotic platforms deployed in these applications. As it can be seen, the first three categories are ground-based gantry robots and robotic arms. And the last category is the novel application of aerial additive manufacturing (aerial AM or AAM), which is still in its infancy and brings a different perspective by deploying aerial vehicles with a robotic manipulator to produce large-scale structures with additive manufacturing methods [Zhang et al., 2022]. This novel production method facilitates multiagent parallel additive manufacturing with an unrestrained build envelope in hard-to-access zones. These characteristics ofAAM respond to the deficiencies of ground-based systems and hold enormous potential and promise for the field of robotic construction. However, in most cases, research in aerial construction methods has been preceded by a ground-based demonstration, and these studies have great relevance to directing future work in aerial robotic construction.