Front matter and table of contents

ISARC is the premiere global conference in the domain of automation and robotics in construction. Specifically, ISARC 2021 is situated in an extremely interesting and important time in history: interest in digitising, automating, and robotising construction is rising in an unprecedented scale on a global level and cross all actors. This manifests itself in an increase in academic research activity, joint industry-academia collaboration projects, the emergence of strong start-ups, and a strong and growing interest of large, established organisations (contractors, machine/robot builders, governments etc.). To prepare ISARC for the future, this year a first attempt was made to restructure IAARC’s topic framework. The technical areas summarize the paper topic areas of interest, which represents all the research themes that are relevant to ISARC/IAARC. This is an important mechanism for the technical committee to consolidate the knowledge accumulated from each year’s conference while allowing for the smooth incorporation of new research topics and trends in the community. We hope that ISARC 2021 and the proceedings serves the audience and readers and all actors interested in automation and robotics in construction as a navigation and reference system for the domain and its most recent outputs and innovations.