By breaking structures down into self-similar building blocks, digital manufacturing methods have come into the spotlight as a part of additive manufacturing. Progress in additive manufacturing has facilitated the production of more complex geometries and reduced material waste i
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By breaking structures down into self-similar building blocks, digital manufacturing methods have come into the spotlight as a part of additive manufacturing. Progress in additive manufacturing has facilitated the production of more complex geometries and reduced material waste in the process. With the goal of scaling additive manufacturing up to the meso and macro scales, robotic assembly of cellular structures is increasingly being researched as a method to construct reconfigurable digital metamaterial structures. However, during robotic assembly and after the manufacturing is complete, the structural systems rely exclusively on external inputs if at all to estimate and monitor structural state. This thesis shows that the endemic robots used to manufacture the structure can also be used to measure deformations. The theoretical measurement characteristics of a bipedal inchworm robot have been calculated showing the expected resolution, accuracy, precision and dynamic range of measurements. Experiments have been conducted to construct a statistical measurement model and assess the nonlinearity of the measurement system. For a beam made up of 3D printed PLA cells with a relative density (p*/p) of 0.05, the results show that the robotic measurement system has resolution several times finer than the elastic range of bending and shear mode deformations for a beam with a single lattice cell cross-section. The robot can also detect stretch mode deformations on single lattice cross-section beams before structural failure. The thesis results demonstrate how inchworm locomoting bipedal assembly robots can be used to measure and monitor various deformations of slender lattice beams up to 3x3 cell cross-section, relying solely on the joint angle measurements used to control the robot. We anticipate this thesis to be a starting point for the integration of structural state measurements to the additive manufacturing process of robotic lattice cell assembly.