Our new paper titled Classification of building systems for concrete 3D printing was just published in the journal Automation in Construction. Congratulations to Romain Duballet who has been working on a classification method for building systems making use of large-scale additive manufacturing. Our aim with this paper is to set a nomenclature and classification system that will be hopefully be adopted by the scientific community in the large-scale additive manufacturing field. The classification we propose also allows to determine the minimal robotic complexity necessary for a given application. Romain is also a founding member of XtreeE, a startup company specialised in developing large-scale 3D printing equipment.

Specific parameters are highlighted – concerning scale, environment, support, and assembly strategies – and a classification method is introduced in the paper. The objective is to explicitly characterise construction systems based on 3D printing processes. A cartography of the different approaches and subsequent robotic complexity is proposed. The state of the art gathered from the literature is mapped thanks to this classification. Here is a depiction of the variations associated with the external support parameter:

More for information, please consult the paper.