To meet climate change goals and respond to increased global urbanisation, the building industry needs to improve both its building technology and its design methods. Constrained urban environments and building stock extensions are challenges for standard timber construction. Co-design promises to better integrate disciplines and processes, promising smaller feedback loops for design iteration and building verification. This article describes the integrated design, fabrication, and construction processes of a timber building prototype as a case study for the application of co-design methods. Emphasis is placed on the development of design and engineering methods, fabrication and construction processes, and materials and building systems. The development of the building prototype builds on previous research in robotic fabrication (including prefabrication, task distribution, and augmented reality integration), agent-based modelling (ABM) for the design and optimisation of structural components, and the systematisation of timber buildings and their components. The results presented in this article include a functional example of co-design from which best practises may be extrapolated as part of an inductive approach to design research. The prototype, with its co-designed process and resultant flat ceilings, integrated services, wide spans, and design adaptability for irregular column locations, has the potential to expand the design potential of multi-storey timber buildings.

Segmented timber shells present a novel building system that utilizes modular, planar building components to create lightweight free-form structures in architecture. Recent advancements in the research field of segmented timber shells pursue, among others, two fundamentally opposing research objectives. 1. The modularity of their building components facilitates the reuse of such structures in response to a changing built environment. 2. Advanced developments aim at establishing segmented timber shells as permanent building structures for sustainable architecture. This paper addresses the first research objective through the successful relocation of the BUGA Wood Pavilion in the context of the proposed methodology of Co-Design for circular construction. The methods and results involve integrative design and engineering processes and advanced quality assessment methods, including structural, geodetic, and physical properties for modular timber constructions. The BUGA Wood Pavilion serves as a building demonstrator for the presented research on segmented shells as lightweight, reusable, and durable timber structures.

In response to the escalating demands of global urbanisation and the environmental imperative to minimise material usage and emissions, this research proposes an autonomous material-robot system to assist in a potential solution for timber building extension. The system demonstrates multi-robot in-situ joining strategies by co-designing a structural joint with a timber building system and mobile robotic agents. In-situ robotic joining techniques are essential for a fully autonomous on-site assembly workflow, but they largely remain unexplored. The investigation focuses on developing a mobile joining robot that locomotes pre-routed grooves while deploying carbon fibre-reinforced polymers (CFRPs), establishing a structurally performant wood joint in-situ. In contrast to current human-centric steel fasteners, CFRPs are flexible and compact and can be easily integrated into mobile robots, enabling the exploration of novel robot-oriented connection typologies. By understanding the timber as an integral part of the robotic system, assembly information, including instructions for navigation, tasks and localisation, is pre-programmed into the material. This substantially reduces robot complexity, weight, size, and cost and allows for decentralised control of the connection agents. The robot path becomes the structural joint path. A fully autonomous assembly choreography can be performed on-site through cooperation between different robots and materials. This leverages the task-specific capabilities of each agent in the team and high-accuracy prefabrication. The introduction of this system proposes a shift away from traditional human-centric construction methods towards a robot-oriented building strategy. This approach challenges the conventional reliance on steel fasteners in timber assemblies and demonstrates the potential for robotic teams to facilitate sustainable and innovative construction methodologies. The research expands on fibrous joints by automating them and furthering Collective Robotic Construction (CRC) research by integrating novel structural fastening methods.