Genetic Algoritm for Stable Brick Assembly – Video

teaching staff: Marta Male-Alemany, Victor Viña, Brian Peters

Our project “material networks” is based upon the investigation of a multimaterial building processes with the aim of being able to generate material networks which depending  on environmental factors on site such as heat, light, wind may feature specialized physical properties according to  the quantity and deposition of the single materials in the network. The deposition process is based on a piling principle. The project is still progressing,meanwhile some of the accomplished tasks and stages of the project are illustrated below.

simulation of granular material deposition in processing

various nozzle types with each a specific material can be placed in order to simulate multiple gemometric patterns emerging during deposition over time; even this simulation is still two dimensional it already conveys an idea of th ecomplex interaction of material which is possible through stacking of multiple layers.

an extension of the processing script allows  for simulation of the wettening process as well; water can be poured on top of the sand piles and the penetration depth can be analized thus informing about the quantitative relation between the  thickness of the deposited material layer and the poured amount of water.

this is the first approach of replicating the “light detector” from the hacking workshop in a processing simulation; the idea is that an environmental physical value can be measured ( grey scale ring ) and the pile deposition can happen within a certain “wall” thickness corresponding to the measured environmental factor; i.e. we can measure radiation and react accordingly with different wall thicknesses.

click here to see the “granular material simulation” working

nozzle collecting sand particles from a point and a second nozzle  depositing them in another point.

Also in a bigger scale it was necessary to simulate the movement of a double nozzle autonomous machine to define its possible trajectory so that

it never steps on what it did. The coordinates of the movement and the deposition points are exported to a txt format available to be used by the

milling machine. The green circles are the piles of sand and the red, the holes (negative) created to the points from which the sand is collected.