Check these spiderbots weave ingenious labyrinth with carbon fiber

Seeing the pair of these spidebots crawl along the walls and interact with one another in swarm fashion in the video doesn’t look very appealing to eyes at first but the story they ‘weave’ (quite literally) in between surely leaves you wanting for more at the end.

It’s interesting to watch these robots with spools of carbon fiber thread that they pass back and forth after affixing to points on the wall and what they create is truly ingenious and gives food for thought as to how uniquely we can utilize some of the vacant spaces in any room.

The concept behind the Mobile Robotic Fabrication System for Filament Structures that has been developed at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute for Computational Design is “swarm construction” where many small robots work together to produce a single item. In this case, the bots are like wall-hugging Roombas weaving a carbon fiber nook that looks like it sprang fully formed out of a Spirograph. This particular project was built on the work of ICD graduate student Maria Yablonina.

“We are only at the very beginning of exploring the true architectural potential of this fabrication system,” ICD director AchimMenges told Dezeen. “But we are convinced that its main advantage is that you can build entirely new structures that would be impossible to materialize otherwise.”

Menges is inspired by nature’s economy and ingenuity; his team has based buildings on insect and lobster shells, and the bots described here clearly are influenced by arachnids and other silk-weaving animals.

The team now plans to increase the number of robots and allow them to maneuver and attach the fibers to other surfaces, like ceilings or curved walls. That should allow for even more unusual creations.