ROBOTs at DETMOLDER RÄUME WEEK
ROBOTs at DETMOLDER RÄUME WEEK
During the Detmolder Räume Woche at the Detmold School of Design (TH OWL), three thematically interconnected projects converged into a series of cross-disciplinary workshops that brought together students from the MID Master of Integrated Design, the Bachelor programmes in Architecture and Interior Architecture as well as a transfer-focused “TRInnovationOWL” impulse project (TransferBuddy) which is being realized Mohammed Tareef under the co-mentorship of Martin Griese (IFE) and Hans Sachs. Together, they created an exceptionally productive and forward-looking week at the intersection of robotics, digital fabrication, and architectural design.
Workshop 1 — CO-CREATIVE ROBOTS IN ARCHITECTURE (MID2050)
Supervised by Victor Sardenberg, Ph.D., this MID/MIAD seminar explored robotic pick-and-place, bending and assembly as a co-creative design process for architectural space frame structures. Students worked with the Universal Robots UR10e collaborative arm, constructing scale models from metal wire (pictures follow!). Students developed integrated workflows combining Grasshopper-based robotic programming, exploring questions of scale, material processing, geometry and assembly in contemporary practice.
Workshop 2 — DIY ROBOTS IN ARCHITECTURE (BA6010)
Led by Yusuf Aykin, Hrithik Shetty and Hans Sachs, this four-day intensive workshop (module BA6010, 4 ECTS, 2 SWS) welcomed 16 participants from all design disciplines. No prior programming or robotics experience was required — and the results were remarkable. Students built, assembled, programmed, and iterated custom robotic tools and vehicles from low-cost, open-source hardware, ranging from Arduino-powered rovers to self-assembled robotic arms. The workshop drew on a DIY and prototyping ethos, using accessible technology as a catalyst for creative exploration of automated design processes. By the end of the week, a large proportion of the bachelor students were programming independently — a testament for the high motivation of the participants.
Impulse Project — OWL TransferBuddy
The third strand of the week was the OWL TransferBuddy impulse project (funded through TRiNNOVATION OWL), led by Prof. Hans Sachs, Martin Griese and Prof. Dr. Jessica Rubart, with Mohammed Tareef Alsyoufi (MID) as project researcher. This project deployed the LuxAI QTrobot RD-V2 as a mobile, humanoid conversation moderator for knowledge transfer contexts — structuring discussions, identifying relevant institutional competencies, and generating “matchmaking cards” from a curated, fully offline local knowledge corpus. The project demonstrated how humanoid robotics can serve not as a showcase technology, but as a practical tool for facilitating structured dialogue between universities and industry partners.
Overall Outcomes and Significance
The workshops were highly successful across all three tracks. Students engaged with real hardware immediately, demonstrated rapid learning curves, and produced concrete prototypes by the end of the week. The cross-disciplinary format — spanning MID, Architecture and Interior Architecture — proved particularly generative, as different design perspectives enriched the shared robotic research agenda.
Taken together, the three projects send a strong signal for the future of construction robotics. Rather than focusing on large-scale industrial robot arms, the work points toward a paradigm shift: small, adaptive, partially autonomous specialist robots — closer in spirit to drones or robotic swarms — capable of performing specific construction tasks such as bricklaying, bending, plastering, or sawing. These systems are more flexible, lower in cost, and more easily integrated into complex and irregular building sites than conventional industrial robots. The week at Detmold established a compelling proof of concept for this direction, and demonstrated that architecture and design education is a productive ground for pioneering exactly this kind of innovation.
