Michael J. Berens Thursday, December 04, 2014

Imagine building an entire 30-story hotel from the ground up in just 15 days. Sounds like futuristic pie-in-the-sky?

Just watch the video above. A private Chinese construction company, the Broad Group, did just that in 2012 using robotics to prefabricate entire floors, according to a new report from Robotic Business Review.

Other innovative uses of robotics are just around the corner. And the day may not be far off when humans and robots will be working side-by-side at construction sites.

Construction would appear to be an industry ripe for automation. As Robotworx, a supplier of industrial robots, notes: "Most construction jobs are repetitious, labor-intensive, and dangerous — perfectly suited for robot automation. Robots have the speed, dexterity and power necessary to transform construction. From laying brick, to handling delicate windows and insulation, they have the potential to become a valued part of future construction."

Among the benefits of using robots cited in the RBR report are reduced construction costs, increased construction speeds, and easier and safer work for construction workers.

Earlier this year Building Design + Construction reported on the current use and development of bricklaying and demolition robots, aerial drones for site inspections, and large-scale 3-D printers that can create building components.

An educator in the Los Angeles area is developing a process called Contour Crafting that uses 3-D printers to produce large-scale structures directly from architectural CAD models. Walls are built up by forming their outer surfaces via extrusion of a paste-like material, such as concrete, and the use of a robotic trowel to provide a smooth contoured surface. At some point, experts envision, 3-D printers could be used to print entire buildings and many of their internal components.

And what about those robot workers? Researchers at The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have designed termite-inspired bots, called TERMES, that can build 3-D structures from foam blocks without supervision and even without predetermined roles.

A new report from PwC and the Manufacturing Institute on how a new generation of robots is transforming the manufacturing industry finds that "robots are now being developed with more 'human' capabilities and traits, such as sensing, dexterity, memory, trainability and object recognition." A new generation of "collaborative" robots would allow man and machine to work side by side.

Unlike many manufacturing processes, building requires ongoing assessment and adjustment to address the particular characteristics of each site and project — in short, a human touch. But research underway could change that. Through the use of new materials, engineering, software and algorithms, researchers are refining how robots act and interact.

One promising area involves recent advances in haptics, the ability of a robot to sense and respond to touch. Francois Conti, a visiting lecturer at Stanford University in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, explains, "You can't have a very stiff robot without any force sensing capabilities. You need a robot that can feel and comply with its environment."

Technologies enabling robots to perceive, manipulate and feel their environment are all leading toward greater autonomy, so that the robot does not need a human controller to guide its movements or alert it to obstacles or other changes in working conditions. These technologies would also make robots safer "collaborative" agents, as they would be able to detect the presence of a human and modify their behavior accordingly.

Just as new computing technologies revolutionized the design and engineering of buildings, allowing for the construction of fluid and billowing shapes, so robotics may one day inspire new forms of architecture and construction.

More importantly, robots may prove to be the solution to providing quality, affordable housing for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who inhabit the world's swelling cities and for the tens of millions more who are migrating to urban areas every year.