Drones @ Home

As the textile industry transforms to be more sustainable and circular, I propose the use of microdrones as digitized actuators for weaving and knitting fabric on-demand.

The global textile industry is in a state of staggered disruption; digital tools are changing some parts of the process rapidly while other stages remain locked in by machines and methods that resist evolution. 

As our society adapts to the imperative to reconsider the extractive, exploitative supply chains that exist in many industries, there are many benefits of a digitized textile production lifecycle yet to be realized. But in order to fully transform, every stage of the process must be examined.
In this project, I propose a radical re-imagining of the traditional textile manufacturing process. 

By utilizing drones - aerial robots - rather than gravity-bound looms and knitting machines, I believe that the advantages of all our new computational design tools can be realized precisely in physical space. Drones are uniquely capable of creating the complex interworked spatial paths that make up textile structures, and can be endlessly reprogrammed and reconfigured to meet different specifications. At a micro-scale, drones could follow bio-mimetic swarm patterns. The possibilities of hardware, software, and networking together for on-demand actuation are exciting.