Robotic embankment

Abstract Automating earth-moving tasks has the potential to resolve labour-shortage, allow for unseen designs and foster sustainability through using on-site materials. In this interdisciplinary project involving robotics landscape architecture, we combine our previous work on autonomous excavation of free-form shapes, dynamic design terrain modelling tools into a robotic system. It tightly connects survey, fabrication exchange information in real-time during fabrication. We purposely built LiDAR survey drone tight integration. The environment contains balance cut fill volumes material-neutral, construction. Its parametric nature allows it adapt geometry changing site conditions Our walking excavator is used create these shapes natural granular material. propose an planner embankments that computes next location subsequently where excavated soil should be dumped. This system achieves world’s first completion with high accuracy. A $$20\hbox { m}$$ 20 m long S-shaped two-faced embankment corner roughly 0.03–0.05 m average error were created.