Neri Oxman and her Mediated Matter group at MIT have created a swarm of robots designed to rapidly build high-strength tubular structures by winding fibreglass filament around themselves.
Oxman and her team have developed a digital fabrication system, comprised of 16 robots and a separate design system used to control them.
Each robot in the swarm is identical and works simultaneously, using a fibreglass winding system to autonomously construct self-supporting composite tubes up to 4.5 metres tall.

The main body of each robot is encased in an inflatable silicone membrane. By inflating this membrane, the robot can fix itself to the existing structure, which in this case is a cylindrical tube attached to the ground.
Once inflated, a mixture of fibreglass thread and resin is then fed through to an extended, winding arm on the robot from a ground-based storage system, mixing the materials in the nozzle and winding the wetted fibre around itself to form a high-strength exterior layer. The robot then deflates itself in order to detach from the fibre layer once it has solidified, before moving upwards along the tube to repeat the process, building the tubular structures segment by segment.

Each segment ? measuring nine centimetres in length and 10 centimetres in diameter ? overlaps the next, fixing itself to the end of the existing tube and setting to form part of the growing structure.
The robots all follow a preplanned trajectory determined by a custom algorithm, where the cur...