Will hyper-tech robots build domed cities across the Martian dunes?

When historians of the future write the chronicles on Mars’ first cosmopolis, Xavier De Kestelier is likely to be highlighted as one of its primary architects: he recently unveiled his studio’s Martian outpost – entirely built by robots - at London’s Design Museum.

The base showcases how robo-builders could join forces with human designers to recreate Mars in the Earth’s image. De Kestelier, head of design technology at the atelier Hassell, says he hopes it will help spark a robotics revolution in construction across two worlds.

Robots sculpted the futuristic décor inside the outpost’s circular café, which carries countless echoes of the designs animating Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Droids would also be deployed to tend a miniature Garden of Eden envisioned for the first Mars colonists.

To give would-be explorers worldwide a preview of how the Mars station could be built before the first humans land, De Kestelier co-created an animation, posted on YouTube, that pans across an army of bots as they carve a life-shielding dome out of the planet’s orange-red dunes.

Just as battalions of bees join up to construct intricate hives, De Kestelier says, his swarms of intelligent, interlinked robots will collectively begin assembling the Mars base four years before the first humans arrive with pressurized modules to place inside these domes.

With their captivating virtual models and progress in robotically printing elements of the enclave, De Kestelier’s team of “extraterrestrial architects” became elite finalists in NASA’s 3D Printed Habitat Challenge, aimed at crafting sanctuaries across the Martian sands.

The rise of robotics is already upending manufacturing by the globe’s great powers, he says, but so far the transformation of architecture has only played out on the sector’s experimental frontier, with vanguard studios using competitions like NASA’s to test out new technologies.

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology researchers are spearheading computational designs brought to life through robot-powered building systems. When these breakthroughs coalesce into a full-blown robotics revolution, he predicts, they will remake the sphere of architecture.

De Kestelier has forged an alliance with NASA engineers at the forefront of creating new generations of AI-enhanced robots to autonomously carve out off-planet havens: in one study he co-authored with a constellation of NASA researchers, they issued an astonishing prediction.

Within just three generations, sophisticated robotic building ateliers will be able to replicate themselves as they reshape Mars. Domed Martian cities tended by phalanxes of robots will host a new branch of human civilization – one that has become largely independent of Earth.