Robots Share Data, Work Together on Experimental Jobsite
Date Posted: November 30, 2023
Posted In: News, Workforce,
From Construction Dive: A team of researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver demonstrated how its collection of robots could work autonomously on an actual jobsite, per a UBC news release, a preview that one professor called a glimpse into the future.
The team at UBC’s Smart Structures Lab showed the tech off at a jobsite demonstration on Mitchell Island in Richmond, British Columbia on Nov. 14.
Camera bearing aerial drones captured details that were then used to create digital twins of the jobsite. With that “as-built” information, AI-equipped cranes and forklifts moved construction materials, such as beams and columns, around the actual site, and navigated around obstacles without needing a human operator.
Dive Insight:
The impetus for the tech’s development, Yang told Construction Dive, stemmed from the labor shortage that is stymieing contractors across the U.S. and Canada. Yang said that while the robot technology was usable and jobsite ready, it wasn’t commercially available yet.
However, the road block isn’t permanent — Yang said he expects that in the next 10 years, autonomous construction machinery will become “second nature.”
“Our goal is to ensure the workers actually become managers instead of doing the physical hard work,” Yang said. “They are controlling a machine, or they’re giving instructions to machines to do the job.”
In addition to labor, an autonomous system can also detect if workers enter an unsafe area. Yang said the software did more than 1,024 checks a second.