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Timber planter pods stacked on slender columns above a street, planted with trees and shrubs

Semiramis

Tech Cluster Zug, Switzerland · 2022 · Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich

A vertical habitat for plants. Four robots assembled its timber pods at once, with motion planning connected through COMPAS FAB.

Semiramis stands at the entrance of the Tech Cluster Zug: a vertical habitat for plants and small animals, five amorphous timber pods on slender steel columns. Its overall composition came from a machine-learning design method developed with the Swiss Data Science Center, scored on sunshade, rain occlusion and plantable surface. A custom tool, built with the Computational Robotics Lab, shaped the individual pods while keeping every panel flat and within fabricable sizes.

How COMPAS was used

The cross-laminated timber plates were robotically assembled at the Robotic Fabrication Laboratory, ETH Zurich, the first time four robots worked there simultaneously. Gramazio Kohler Research built integrations between Intrinsic's robot planning technology and COMPAS FAB, their open-source robotic fabrication package, to plan that assembly.

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