THEY named it THOR. In a dusty lot in Konz, Germany, an 18-tonne excavator kitted out with sensors and a computer slowly scoops a pile of dirt, hoists it into the air, and dumps it into the back of a nearby truck. Scoop and dump. Scoop and dump.
It鈥檚 boring work 鈥� and that鈥檚 the point, says Daniel Schmidt, who heads up THOR, or the Terraforming Heavy Outdoor Robot project, at the University of Kaiserslautern.
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鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to automate the tasks that excavators are doing,鈥� says Schmidt. 鈥淲e want to be able to remove operators from tasks that are very cyclic, very monotonous, things like that.鈥�
Schmidt isn鈥檛 the only one with an eye on getting bots onto building sites. The trend promises a boost in efficiency and architectural possibilities 鈥� but what might it mean for workers?
For THOR, at least, it will be a while before the robot starts working on real projects. In December, it successfully completed tests at Volvo鈥檚 test facility for construction equipment 鈥� moving piles of material on its own, and creating a trench and a slope.
Construction robots that utilise different materials are also being put through their paces. Flying bots from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) that can weave ropes together to make a bridge will be presented at the Rob Arch conference in Sydney, Australia, in March, as will others that work with concrete or sheet metal.
Some builder bots have already found their way into the real world. In Victor, New York, a company called Construction Robotics offers a semi-automated masonry machine, nicknamed SAM, that can lay bricks three times as fast as a human, and has contributed to buildings in New York and Washington DC.
鈥淲e want to be able to remove operators from tasks that are very cyclic, very monotonous鈥�
And later this year the Graham Kohler research group at ETH Zurich will unveil a 2300-square-metre wooden roof over a building on the university campus. The roof is being made off-site by a wood-wielding robot that grips, trims, positions and nails thousands of timber slats into a layered pattern (see photo) 鈥� although the pieces will be assembled on-site by people. The group is also working on a robotic arm that stacks bricks in preplanned designs and another that painstakingly lays ceramic tiles.
The point of technology like this isn鈥檛 to make humans obsolete, says , an architect on the timber-bot team. It鈥檚 to work with humans, to make possible novel architectural designs that are too complex to be assembled by humans alone. 鈥淏y using robots, you can connect digital information to physical reality,鈥� he says.
There will be human consequences, however. A report, published by Forrester Research in October, estimated that automation will eliminate 16 per cent of all jobs in construction and extraction by 2025.
The logical solution is to prepare the workforce for the new jobs of a digital economy: to crunch data, work with software, and oversee robotic underlings, says Darrell West, at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. 鈥淚t鈥檚 fairly easy to design robots to do repetitive activities. In fact, they often do those things better than humans,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e definitely need to devote more attention to retraining workers.鈥�
(Image: ETH Z眉rich / production facility of ERNE AG Holzbau)
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭he house that bots built鈥�
