Construction robots are now working at a job site near you. After decades of successful operation in controlled factories, robotic technology is ready for the less predictable context of in situ building.
The motivations for this shift seem obvious: for humans, building construction is labor-intensive and full of potential hazards, and an increasingly volatile climate means fewer hours to work safely outdoors. Automated machines can also fill in during labor shortages and carry out the more tedious and repetitive tasks, keeping projects on track despite workforce challenges.
However, the onsite building has many challenges for robots, as the construction arena is an entirely different world than the manufacturing floor. “On a construction site, there are many unknown factors that a construction robot must be able to account for effectively,” explains Jiansong Zhang, an assistant professor of construction management technology at Purdue University. “This requires much more advanced sensing and reasoning technologies than those commonly used in a manufacturing environment.”
The adoption of computer vision algorithms provides robotic systems such as the one Zhang’s team has developed with a more sophisticated awareness of their physical contexts. This enables them to track obstructions and hazards while maintaining close alignment with building information modeling (BIM) data. Such advances have led to the proliferation of a wide variety of robots that have found their way alongside their human counterparts.
