Construction robot builds massive stone walls on its own

An autonomous robot with a large gripper can transform a pile of boulders into huge stone walls without mortar – learning on its own how to place each irregularly-shaped stone as the next building block. The robotic excavator has built a stone wall 6 metres high and 65 metres long through a public park on the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland. It also used a large shovel to autonomously landscape the park's terrain into terraces. "This is the first work to apply such a robotic excavator for the large-scale construction of permanent dry stone walls," says Ryan Luke Johns at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Johns and his colleagues equipped the robot with lidar, which employs lasers to measure distances, so it could create its own 3D map of a construction site. They also trained several artificial intelligence models to help the robot figure out the best way to grasp and place individual stones.