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A worker walking past a tracked robot that stands beside a tall, twisting steel mesh it has fabricated

Mesh Mould

ETH Zurich, Switzerland · 2017 · Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich

A mobile robot bends and welds steel rebar into a mesh that is both the formwork and the reinforcement of a concrete element.

Mesh Mould unifies reinforcement and formwork into a single robotically fabricated system. After a first phase of spatial robotic extrusion in polymer, the research at the NCCR Digital Fabrication turned it into a load-bearing construction system: a fully automated process that bends and welds meshes from 6 mm steel rebar, with a specialised robotic end-effector developed together with the Agile & Dexterous Robotics Lab.

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