Manipulation and Assembly of Small Components: History, Trends and Future

Construction processes involving the manipulation and assembly of small components are ver ancient. These traditional processes, among which masonry is the most developed (but not the only one) have undergone very slight progress until the last decades. Improving the efficiency of the process was the main incentive to such progress. The growing concern about the improvement of work conditions and availability of robotics technique gave a new impulse to the developments of these processes. New design of components and of automatic machines have been made. This paper draws out the main lines of the historical perspective and underlines the trends of these developments. Economical perspective are outlined through his information and from experimental work carried out at the laboratory of robotics of the CSTB.