Researchers at the University of Stuttgart have devised a new method of construction using mini robots that they claim is cheap, fast and can create structures that would otherwise be impossible to build.

Instead of using one or two large robots, their carbon fibre fabrication method involves many small robots that look like Roomba vacuums and could fit inside a single suitcase.

The agile robots, which climb walls and ceilings, work in concert to pull fibre filaments across a space, creating a structure on-site.

"We are only at the very beginning of exploring the true architectural potential of this fabrication system, but we are convinced that its main advantage is that you can build entirely new structures that would be impossible to materialise otherwise," architect Achim Menges, the director of the University of Stuttgart's Institute for Computational Design (ICD), told Dezeen.
"Pragmatically, smaller robots will be cheaper and, in working collaboratively in larger numbers, faster than the established systems."

The ICD developed the project with the Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) ? their partners on the carbon-fibre Elytra Filament Pavilion currently on display at London's V&A museum ? as well as graduate student Maria Yablonina, on whose research the work is based.

The project constitutes a form of "swarm construction" ? a fabrication method, predicted to be common in the future, that involves swarms o...