Introduction — ACORN

On the digital side, our primary objectives are:

To combine structural design and analysis methods with optimisation routines that can propose the external geometry and internal reinforcement arrangement required to meet user-defined performance requirements.
To coherently link these novel design methods to appropriate robotic manufacturing processes, establishing key computational tools for constructability that consider automated manufacturing and whole-life value as an embedded part of the design process.

Supporting these, we aim to:

Reduce carbon intensity by only placing material where it is needed.
Work with end-users to ensure these computational tools can be seamlessly embedded in the design and fabrication processes, whether they are adaptations of existing processes, or are newly developed by this project.

And as a result, the digital making will help us to:

Propose feasible construction solutions for buildings with automatically manufactured elements of non-standard geometry.