Designing with Uncertainty: AI and Robotics for Circular Construction

You are cordially invited to attend the lecture by Ioanna Mitropoulou:

Date: 6 Nov 2026
Time: 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4, LT427

Designing with Uncertainty: AI and Robotics for Circular Construction

The construction industry has developed highly automated processes for producing new, standardized building components, yet the recovery and transformation of existing materials remain largely manual and difficult to scale. This asymmetry between making and unmaking reveals a fundamental challenge: we have developed highly efficient processes for working with known and controlled conditions, but have far fewer methods for operating under uncertainty.

How, then, can construction automation operate when its inputs and conditions cannot be fully specified in advance? My research proposes adaptive computational construction under uncertainty, using computational design, artificial intelligence, and robotics to develop new approaches to the reuse and remanufacturing of building elements and structures. Rather than eliminating uncertainty before action, I investigate how computational systems can identify, interpret, and adapt to it. This requires a fundamental shift from linear to iterative processes, from dense to targeted information gathering, and from passive sensing to active perception.

These principles form the basis of a research field spanning auditing, disassembly, and remanufacturing, in which AI helps infer what cannot be directly observed and robotic systems adapt their actions as new information becomes available. With this, the research aims to establish new computational foundations for circular construction, moving from automation of known processes towards adaptive systems capable of operating, learning, and making decisions in the uncertain conditions of the existing built environment.

Ioanna Mitropoulou is an architect and researcher developing computational methods for the design, fabrication, and transformation of the built environment under uncertainty and real-world constraints. She received her PhD from ETH Zurich at the Chair of Digital Building Technologies, where her research focused on digital workflows for non-planar robotic additive manufacturing and novel representations for complex fabrication processes. Her doctoral work was supported by the Architecture & Technology Doctoral Fellowship and received the Best Paper Award in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing.

As a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich’s Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture, she developed digital tools for a circular built environment, with a focus on large language models for structuring, enriching, and querying information for building reuse under incomplete and uncertain data. She currently works in applied research and development at F. Preisig AG in Zurich, developing automated workflows for the generation of standardized 2D/3D as-built models of large-scale infrastructure projects from heterogeneous inconsistent input data sources, integrating BIM and AI methods. She is also the developer of the open-source tools COMPAS Slicer and SDQ Meshes.