A team at Switzerland’s ETH Zürich university has unveiled an autonomous excavator that can build dry stone walls from randomly shaped boulders and concrete rubble.
Researchers have taught a robotic excavator called HEAP to construct a giant stone wall on its own. Researchers from ETH Zurich have taught a robotic excavator called HEAP to construct a dry stone wall that reaches six meters in height and 65 meters in length on its own.
Autonomous excavator constructs a 6-meter-high dry-stone wall techxplore.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from techxplore.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
<p>ETH Zurich researchers taught an autonomous excavator to construct dry stone walls itself using boulders weighing several tonnes and demolition debris.</p>
<p>In brief:</p>
<ul> <li style="text-align:justify">Until today, dry stone wall construction has involved vast amounts of manual labour.</li> <li style="text-align:justify">A multidisciplinary team of ETH Zurich researchers developed a method of using an autonomous excavator to construct a dry-stone wall that is six metres high and sixty-five metres long.</li> <li style="text-align:justify">Dry stone walls are resource efficient as they use locally sourced materials, such as concrete slabs that are low in embodied energy</li>
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