Is the Day of the Fully Automated Construction Site Dawning?

Business Insights
25/04/2018

The building site is changing, once the province of men in hard hats wearing high vis jackets, clambering over scaffolding, driving tipper trucks, laying bricks and manoeuvring roofing frames into place, technology is taking over.


The construction industry complaining of a lack of skilled trades is looking towards automation for a solution. For example, a traditional brick wall, is normally, built by hand, brick by brick, with a typical bricklayer being only able to place something like 500 bricks in a day; whereas, Construction Robotics’ Semi-Automated Mason, or SAM, can put down 6,000 per day, with mortar. SAM won’t eliminate all human workers, they would still needed to tidy up the mortar and load SAM, but the heavy lifting would be done by the machine.


Even where robots can’t be used, construction workers are increasingly being tasked to integrate data into their everyday work and we are seeing a rising number of construction workers getting instant access to the data they need via personal devices for faster answers and increased productivity.


It is developing drone technology that is allowing the devices to connect with workers and machinery to power and monitor the jobsite through monitoring stockpiles, directing earthmovers, tracking productivity and much more.


The technology is resulting in an increase in tech-driven machinery on the job site to operationalize construction equipment. Sensors allow organizations to gather information direct from the source and port it into centralized business apps to track everything from the wear and tear on equipment, GPS locations of trucks or even fuel consumption across onsite vehicles.


The use of aerial drones for survey purposes has become the norm, but drones are also becoming tools for more than just data capture and transmission, with load-bearing capacity to haul equipment, move materials and transport tools. The real question isn’t if drones will continue to grow in use, but how they will be regulated.


3D printing is also having a huge impact on the construction industry - cutting both the time and cost of building houses. The UN estimates that by 2030 approximately three billion people will require housing and has mooted 3D printing as one possible solution.


A team in the School of Civil and Building Engineering at Loughborough University has been working on the technology since 2007, first developing a 3D concrete printer within a frame and more recently adapting it to work with a robotic arm


Using a robotic arm means that the team can print up to 10 times faster and create a huge variety of forms, including curved, hollow and geometrically complex shapes. Companies who have become early adopters of 3D printing will learn a huge amount about automation and robotics and how they can be exploited on a site.


3D concrete printing, when combined with a type of mobile prefabrication centre, has the potential to reduce the time needed to create complex elements of buildings from weeks to hours, achieving a level of quality and efficiency which has never been seen before in construction.


3D printing has been building walls a layer at a time for a few years now. In some cases, the walls are built in sections and trucked to a site where they are assembled. Other systems do their printing on site. Copenhagen’s BOD building has a gantry printer capable of putting down layers of concrete 50 to 70 millimeters thick at 2.5 meters per minute. The concrete it will use is mostly made from sand and recycled tiles.


The gantry—or the robotic arm—that prints them, is the primary limitation on 3D printed buildings. Not only are they constrained by the physical size of a printer, a large site can’t really use more than one at a time, as they get in each other’s way. So instead of one giant autonomous builder, why not use hundreds, or thousands, of tiny ones? A swarm of robots could be capable of working together on a building of unlimited size, without colliding. Harvard researchers have created brick laying “termite bots” for instance.


The growth in technological applications for use in the construction sector is still evolving, but greater market acceptance of smarter field management systems, is giving forward thinking organizations a tangible commercial edge. Computer controlled from a central point, drones, remotely controlled bulldozers, robots and 3D printers are shaping the future of construction.