Adapting Building Technology to Facilitate Robotization

This paper reports on the preliminary work of a research project which is looking at the extent to which modifications in basic building technology might be necessary to accelerate the progressive robotization of on-site production processes. The research programme, which is outlined, will incorporate studies of on-site processes for certain superstructure elements of factory and office buildings. A subsequent stage will assess the suitability of robots developed in other industries for dealing with these on-site processes. The feasibility of constructing a 'mock-up' working, scale model of an appropriate robot will also be studied.