Computational Design and Co-Robotic Fabrication for Material Reuse in Architecture

Climate change and resource depletion demand a shift from the dominant linear "take-make-use-dispose" paradigm of construction toward circular, low-waste practices. Material reuse offers a promising pathway by reducing raw material extraction, mitigating waste, and extending the service lifespan of carbon-sequestering materials such as timber. Realizing this potential, however, requires addressing technical and logistical challenges across both design and construction for accommodating heterogeneous, reclaimed material inventories. This paper presents an integrated framework that couples data-driven computational design with feedback-driven adaptive human-robot collaborative (co-robotic) fabrication and assembly to enable the realization of nonstandard structures made from reclaimed timber of varying length and geometries, supplemented with new off-the-shelf timber when necessary. The framework is validated through Timbrelyn, a built case-study installation that demonstrates how timber reuse can inform and enhance architectural expression. This work contributes to the development of integrated design-to-fabrication workflows that advance adaptive, feedback-driven methods to handle inventory constraints and reclaimed material uncertainties, facilitating material reuse in the design and construction of new buildings and structures.

A Latency-Aware Framework for Visuomotor Policy Learning on Industrial Robots

Industrial robots are increasingly deployed in contact-rich construction and manufacturing tasks that involve uncertainty and long-horizon execution. While learning-based visuomotor policies offer a promising alternative to open-loop control, their deployment on industrial platforms is challenged by a large observation-execution gap caused by sensing, inference, and control latency. This gap is significantly greater than on low-latency research robots due to high-level interfaces and slower closed-loop dynamics, making execution timing a critical system-level issue. This paper presents a latency-aware framework for deploying and evaluating visuomotor policies on industrial robotic arms under realistic timing constraints. The framework integrates calibrated multimodal sensing, temporally consistent synchronization, a unified communication pipeline, and a teleoperation interface for demonstration collection. Within this framework, we introduce a latency-aware execution strategy that schedules finite-horizon, policy-predicted action sequences based on temporal feasibility, enabling asynchronous inference and execution without modifying policy architectures or training. We evaluate the framework on a contact-rich industrial assembly task while systematically varying inference latency. Using identical policies and sensing pipelines, we compare latency-aware execution with blocking and naive asynchronous baselines. Results show that latency-aware execution maintains smooth motion, compliant contact behavior, and consistent task progression across a wide range of latencies while reducing idle time and avoiding instability observed in baseline methods. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly handling latency for reliable closed-loop deployment of visuomotor policies on industrial robots.