At eCAADe 2026 in Lübeck, Germany, Xingjie Xie presented the paper “Towards Heterogeneity in Collective Robotic Construction: Material Hand-Offs within a Team of Climbing and Aerial Robots.” Xie is a PhD exchange researcher from Tongji University conducting research at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD), University of Stuttgart. His research stay at ICD was partially supported by an Incoming Grant from the Cluster of Excellence IntCDC.
The paper, co-authored by Samarth Uttam, Samuel Leder, Philip F. Yuan, and Achim Menges, explores how robots with different capabilities could work together. An aerial robot transports the material across the workspace, while a modular climbing robotic system is designed for precise positioning and assembly within the growing structure. The study compares two proposed ways to transfer material: direct exchange between robots and indirect delivery to a shared workspace for later retrieval.
Indoor experiments assessed the aerial robot’s hovering stability and delivery accuracy with linear building elements ranging from 20 to 60 cm in length. In the indirect delivery tests, all struts reached the target zone, with final planar errors between 1.8 and 2.9 cm. Hovering became less stable as the struts grew longer, underscoring the tighter control demands of a direct exchange.
The findings show how the choice of handoff strategy shapes coordination between aerial and climbing robots. The experiments evaluated the aerial side of the interaction; a complete physical exchange between the robots remains a next step for the research.
Read the open-access paper: https://papers.cumincad.org/data/works/att/ecaade2026_454.pdf
Learn more about the IntCDC Incoming Programme: here.