Construction Robotics Enabling Innovative Disruption and Social Supportability

Productivity indicators in industry suggest that conventional construction methodology has reached its limits. This is true even in highly developed nations, where numerous construction projects cause considerable time, quality and cost deficits. This indicates the necessity of an overdue transformation of the whole sector--in particular of its procedural and technological aspects. Future construction could make use of what other manufacturing and service industries have already successfully implemented. This paper describes the relation-ship between the stagnation and technical limits of conventional construction and the initiation, development, and growth of new strategies and technologies of construction automation and robotics. In the future, construction automation technology, STCR-approaches, service robot systems and other microsystems technology are merging with the built environment, becoming inherent elements of buildings, building components, and building furniture. It can be said that it becomes ubiquitous, and starts pervading our life on earth and in particular built environments. Since this diffusion of robot technology is in most cases strongly linked to the built environment, future activity fields for construction automation will derive from this.