If you found yourself...unsettled...by the notion of quadrocopter construction crews, you may want to skip the videos below. The Flight Assembled Architecture exhibition, which opened yesterday near Paris, is using a squad of four tiny quad-rotored aircraft and a sophisticated tracking system to assemble a six-meter tower out of 1,500 foam blocks. To make the tower, a 'copter picks a brick from a dispenser and flies it to coordinates determined by a digital blueprint and the room's motion-capture system; when its battery gets low, it returns to its perch and is replaced by another. The system averages about one brick per minute.
The two architects involved in the project have created several previous structures with industrial robots, but this is the first using quadrocopters. The structure itself was envisioned as a 1:100 scale model of a modular "vertical village," so keep watching the skies. They may be filled with robots sooner than you think.