HAL Robotics: From Automated Architectural Design for Fabrication, to Architecting Automated Manufacturing Systems

This chapter chronologically presents the genesis of industrial robotics software specialists HAL Robotics. The first part focuses on the founding team’s preliminary motivations and experiments with generative design for manufacturing, leading to the emergence of early robot simulation and control tools within the scope of architectural practice and academia (2010–2014). The second part follows with the design requirements and development milestones of the HAL Robotics Framework for adaptive industrial manufacturing (2014–2022). Typical deployment architectures of the Framework are discussed and illustrated by a series of case studies, ranging from complex toolpath generation for component prefabrication, embedded path planning for mobile construction robots synchronised with BIM models, to cloud-based factory orchestration for distributed manufacturing. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how architectural design thinking helped completing these complex cross-practice software engineering projects, and how variable automation technologies primarily designed for non-standard construction-component manufacturing have progressively percolated to other industrial sectors.