OFF WORLD FREEFORM CONSTRUCTION STRUCTURES

Rupert Soar

Loughborough University

HABITAT ON OTHER PLANETS

The Swarm research demonstrates CFCA’s will provide the mechanism to providing habitats on other planets.  Habitat modules cannot be ‘flown’, so ISRU techniques must be employed to construct completely self-sustaining dynamically optimised homeostatic structures. 

Assuming Freeform Construction may allow habitats to be built which can be de-coupled from the requirements to be near energy supplies or waste management systems, through the integration of self-regulating control systems within the structure, then deployment becomes one of the overriding considerations.   Whether constructing in arid or hostile environments on earth, or constructing habitats on other planets, a different set of requirements for Freeform Construction emerge.  For military bunker applications, then a single large deployable Freeform Construction machine will be an easy target within a theatre of war.  For emergency housing solutions, a single Freeform Construction machine will be difficult to load onto a transporter or plane for deployment; and for off-world applications, there is physically not the payload to accommodate a massive machine.  For all these applications the answer is to devolve the construction process between many smaller mobile construction agents.

As to the level of devolvement, the solutions emerging draw out interesting possibilities and may offer a glimpse as to the direction AMT’s will take in the future.  The image considers the transport and assembly of robotic assembly equipment in which construction occurs at many scales simultaneously. In this approach construction occurs on the macro-scale with a gantry type CC machine (Khoshnevis et al, 2002). fed by a material umbilical from a lunar regolith processing plant.  In-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) will be paramount to any off-world or, for that matter, remote terrestrial applications.  Servicing this machine, as well performing material excavation and pre-processing, are smaller robotic devices.  Certainly, for a lunar application, the control and co-ordination could be performed remotely through tele-presence systems based around operators on earth.  

For situations outside of the line of view of a radio link, and particularly where a signal may take 8 minutes to travel from earth and 8 minutes back, such as Mars for example, then construction agents are required to be capable of co-ordinating and making their own decisions.  In addition, the types of habitats required for a Mars colony will need the levels of adaptability possible only through structural homeostasis, and even this will not be enough.  These structures will need to be self-sufficient, and be able to dynamically optimise themselves for extreme climate fluctuations, ground movement and for increasing numbers of colonists as they arrive on Mars. 

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© 2005 Rupert Soar.  All rights reserved.