The flagship project (for the moment, in that it looks to be the most complete) is the In-situ Fabricator, an autonomous construction robot. It’s an industrial arm on a mobile base that can lay bricks, but the difference between this system and the one from last week is that the In-situ Fabricator is designed to be completely self-contained, without requiring any external localization systems. The robot has a 2D laser rangefinder on it, and once it gets to the construction site, it can build up a 3D map that gets registered to existing localized structural plans. That way, the robot always knows where it is, and can move around a construction site without any additional infrastructure, even autonomously adapting to minor design variations when necessary.
