Last month Fast Company published an article about an interesting project Autodesk Research has been working on for a number of years: internally the project was known as LEGOBot, but now that it’s being talked about publicly it has understandably been renamed to BrickBot.
BrickBot is a really cool project that’s built on two core ideas: robots are stupid and engineering is expensive. Robots need a lot of help to be told what to do, but telling them what to do is neither straightforward (today) nor flexible: you need to code for specific conditions, and if those conditions change you need to add more code.
The over-arching goal of BrickBot is to build a system that takes a 3D model of something and then works out how to fabricate or assemble it. In this initial instance, BrickBot does this with LEGO bricks, but that’s just where things are today.
To be able to build a model from LEGO bricks – or anything, for that matter – there are three separate problems that…