01 · Form finding
Twist, taper, evaluate.
Galapagos searches twist, scale and count against a Ladybug radiation study.
Evolutionary solver exploring the form space
Form matrix
Candidates with their radiation roses
Reinforcement learning · UCL Digital Studio · 2024
A twisted tower, panelled and rationalised, then a PPO agent learns to open and fold its skin from a week of simulated sun.
01 · Form finding
Galapagos searches twist, scale and count against a Ladybug radiation study.
Evolutionary solver exploring the form space
Form matrix
Candidates with their radiation roses
02 · Panelisation
Hexagons where the surface is gentle, triangles where it isn’t; relaxed with Kangaroo, clustered with a Gaussian mixture model.
Three towers and their unrolled grids
Relaxation · Kangaroo settling the mesh
Rules · 4 m slabs, ~1.3 m hexagon
GMM clusters mapped back
03 · Adaptive components
Folding experiments in Kangaroo. Each is a single-parameter action that an agent can learn to control.
Three systems, three towers · hexagonal scaling, triangular folding, diamond folding
Section · hexagonal scaling
Section · triangular folding
04 · Reinforcement learning
Observation: sun-vector radiation per panel. Action: scale factor. Reward: less radiation, less deployed surface. Trained with PPO on 1, 2, 4 and 8-day windows and tested on unseen days.
Training · one panel learning to close
Training · top view
Trained policy on the tower · apertures tracking the sun through a day
1 · 2 · 4 · 8 days of training
Hourly values · longer windows converge lower
RL policy vs parametric rule, same tower, same sun
Interactive