Advances in robotics offer huge opportunity for the construction industry to revolutionize, however, those investing in those advances recognize the challenges facing them.

The building industry is naturally conservative. The relatively long lead time in creating new buildings (not to mention the red tape that goes with it) make it hard for construction companies to invest in this kind of high-tech approach.

But the work of Giftthaler and co should help to overcome this and showcase the ability of robots to create entirely new forms of structure. It’ll be interesting to see if they can do for the construction industry what robots have done, and continue to do, for cars.

If the industry can find ways to embrace innovation and upset age-old practices, this robot will offer many benefits.

So what is the state-of-the-art for construction robots?

Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Markus Giftthaler at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a few pals who have developed a new class of robot capable of creating novel structures on a construction site. They call their new robot the In Situ Fabricator1 and today show what it is capable of.

The In Situ Fabricator1 is designed from the bottom up to be practical. It can build stuff using a range of tools with a precision of less than five millimeters, it is designed to operate semi-autonomously in a complex changing environment, it can reach the height of a standard wall, and it can fit through ordinary doorways. And it is dust- and waterproof, runs off standard electricity, and has battery backup. On top of all this, it must be Internet-connected so that an architect can make real-time changes to any plans if necessary.

Those are a tricky set of targets but ones that the In Situ Fabricator1 largely meets. It has a set of cameras to sense its environment and powerful onboard processors for navigating and planning tasks. It also has a flexible, powerful robotic arm to position construction tools.

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