Initial Steps Towards Quadcopter-based Brick Placement for Construction

We propose the possibility of using an autonomous quadcopter in a construction setting to build meaningful structures. In this paper we demonstrate these ideas using a quadcopter tasked with carrying bricks to locations specified by a notional blueprint. In our demonstrations, the quadcopter carries a foam brick to a predetermined position and places it with respect to the other bricks to create a 2-dimensional structure as specified by the blueprint. Computer vision techniques are used to verify brick positions and motion capture is used to localize the quadcopter. A custom-built 3D printed pick up/drop mechanism is used to carry the brick from the initial point to the final point. We demonstrated that a variety of structures can be created autonomously in practice using a quadcopter. We measure performance in terms of positional correctness of the structure as measured by the lateral placement error and orientation angle error. This paper discusses the theoretical approach to path generation and control systems, computer vision algorithms, blueprint algorithms, and the pick-up and drop mechanism.