Project Summary: 

Australia faces a dual construction crisis: among the least productive sectors in the national economy, and a projected shortfall of over 200,000 dwellings by 2029, while conventional building methods send most end-of-life materials to landfill. This research proposes an alternative: the Circular Robotic Housing Chassis, a stick-based structural timber platform designed from the outset for Manufacture, Assembly, and Disassembly (DfMAD). 

The project develops a “Digital Vernacular”, a taxonomy of traditional friction-fit joinery, drawn principally from Japanese carpentry, reinterpreted through the precision of 6-axis robotic fabrication. Where contemporary prefabrication depends on steel fasteners and adhesives that bypass material recovery, these joints hold through geometry alone. The same kinematic property that permits a robot to fabricate a joint, and a human to snap-fit it on site without specialist training, later enables non-destructive disassembly, returning structural members to circulation at full material value. 

At the core of the workflow is Chippie, a three-tier algorithmic auditing engine that certifies joints computationally, across geometry and kinematics, force and friction, and material limit states, before a single cut is made. Developed within a custom Grasshopper environment and validated through robotic prototyping at Swinburne’s ProtoLab (KUKA KR 120), the system treats craft knowledge as computable design intelligence: tacit knowledge, made explicit through data. 

The thesis contributes to UN SDGs 9, 11, and 12, positioning housing components as recoverable material banks rather than demolition waste, and asking how automation might preserve, rather than displace, the knowledge embedded in vernacular craft. 

Key references: (Polanyi, 1967; Brand, 1994; Yan et al., 2022; van Nimwegen and Latteur, 2023; Cheng et al., 2025; Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2025; Torres et al., 2025; Rivero Torres et al., 2026). 

Brand, S. (1994) How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. Viking. Available at: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=68DYAAAAMAAJ. 

Cheng, F.-C. et al. (2025) “Review of Advances in the Robotization of Timber Construction,” Buildings, 15(20), p. 3747. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15203747. 

Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2025) Circular economy introduction. Available at: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/topics/circular-economy-introduction/overview (Accessed: September 26, 2025). 

van Nimwegen, S.E. and Latteur, P. (2023) “A state-of-the-art review of carpentry connections: From traditional designs to emerging trends in wood-wood structural joints,” Journal of Building Engineering, 78, p. 107089. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2023.107089. 

Polanyi, M. (1967) The Tacit Dimension. Anchor Books (Anchor books). Available at: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=jwLXAAAAMAAJ. 

Rivero Torres, J.L. et al. (2026) “Towards a Circular Robotic Housing Chassis: A Data-Led Methodology for Robotic Fabrication and Reversible Timber Tectonics,” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Design and Robotic Fabrication (CDRF 2026). Circular Intelligence 2026 International Conference on Computational Design and Robotic Fabrication, Sydney, Australia: Springer. 

Torres, V. et al. (2025) “Challenges in the Design for Disassembly of Light Timber Framing Panelized Components,” Buildings, 15, p. 321. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15030321. 

Yan, Z. et al. (2022) “Performance of reversible timber connections in Australian light timber framed panelised construction,” Journal of Building Engineering, 61, p. 105244. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2022.105244.