Abstract: This lecture presents a research vision for Behavioral Production, an emerging paradigm at the intersection of design, engineering, and autonomous systems. In response to housing insecurity, labor shortages, and the environmental impacts of conventional construction, the work reframes building production as a responsive, adaptive, and materially intelligent process grounded in semi-autonomous fabrication, multi-agent coordination strategies, robotic platforms and tools, and generative computational design. Drawing on aerial and ground-based collective robotic construction and multi-agent design strategies informed by deep learning, the lecture outlines pathways toward scalable and affordable building systems that address urgent societal needs.

Bio: Robert Stuart-Smith is Founding Director of the Master of Science in Design: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS) program, Assistant Professor of Architecture, and an affiliate faculty member in the Engineering School’s GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). He is also a Principal Research Associate in University College London’s (UCL) Department of Computer Science. Stuart-Smith leads the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab across Penn and UCL, where he has secured over $6.9M in competitive research funding and collaborates with industry partners including Cemex, Skanska, Mace, Buro Happold, Arup, and the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC). Stuart-Smith’s research focuses on robotics-enabled fabrication and construction systems, adaptive multi-robot processes, and integrated AI-driven generative design workflows. His Aerial Additive Manufacturing research —published in Nature—introduced in-flight additive manufacturing using coordinated aerial robotic agents. Stuart-Smith’s work has also been published in Science Robotics, AD Architectural Design, and L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and featured by outlets including BBC Click, New Scientist, Smithsonian, and Architizer.