This is the WFHB Local News for Tuesday, January 4th, 2021.

This week, we will take a look back at the stories we covered in the year 2021.

In today’s episode, you will hear WFHB Correspondent Aaron Comforty report on a company that focuses on using artificial intelligence and drone technology to construct environmentally sound buildings out of natural materials.

More in Local News: 2021 In Review.

Terran Robotics: AI Meets Natural Building

The startup aims to use AI to make natural building affordable and fast.

By Aaron B. Comforty

This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

The first rendering of a Terran Robotics designed home. Prefabricated Quonset roofs form an important structural component of the house.

Aaron Comforty: We’ve invited the founders of the Bloomington based Terran Robotics startup onto the program. The company focuses on using artificial intelligence and drone technology to construct environmentally sound buildings out of natural materials. Terran Robotics is a recent recipient of a National Science Foundation grant worth about a quarter of a million dollars. Daniel Weddle, Zach Dwiel, and Nate O’Donnell, thanks for joining us on WFHB News. Daniel, you’ve been building tiny homes out of natural materials, for about ten years now, here in Bloomington. And as you know, this City is facing an acute housing shortage, and in the U.S. as a whole, it’s much the same story. Some analysts are predicting that the next decade will see a construction boom to meet demand. So why not use standard building methods and materials, like wooden frame construction, drywall, fiberglass insulation, and the like?

Daniel Weddle: So all of those material expenses–you could make arguments about their sustainability. Looking at automation, and the way we’re approaching building these homes, we need the simplest thing to put together, and that’s cob. It’s fairly predictable, it’s in aggregate form, and we can stack it and form it.

Comforty: What is Cob?

Weddle: It’s a mixture of clay, sand, and straw. Sometimes you’ll have portland or lime in there for stabilization, but we’re trying to stay true to form and stay with just sand, clay, and straw. Then you’ll have some kind of exterior coating on it. It can be oil, often you’ll just see more earth. Sometimes you’ll have a mixture of lime on the outside to get a little bit more weather protection.

 

A rendering of a Terran Robotics house. The  3 – 4 bedroom house was designed to fit in a typical lot in Bloomington, Indiana, the city where the company is based.

 

Comforty: Some of the renderings Terran Robotics has posted online are really beautiful. It strikes me as a sort of old meets new. Zach, you and Danny have collaborated in the past on natural building projects. What makes this project different? And what kind of building technologies is Terran using and developing at the moment?

Zach Dwiel: Yeah, what makes it different is just our extreme focus on what is automatable, what is cheap, and what we can do with low-cost materials. How can we  use things like clay, soil, and sand to build a structure autonomously. To do the actual construction, we’re using a heavy lift drone, which can lift somewhere between 50-100 pounds, picking up cob, putting it on the wall, and also using that drone to form the wall and shape it like you would a sculpture. Eventually it would do other tasks, like picking up pavers and bricks, fiberglass mesh, ceiling panels, and all sorts of things. The benefit of the drone is that we can move anywhere on the construction site without worrying about running into stuff on the ground, having mud in inconvenient places,