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University of British Columbia professor Tony Yang believes that new tech will drastically change the construction landscape over the next 10 years.
Published Nov. 29, 2023
Lead researcher Dr. Tony Yang observes as the robot decides how to navigate around the obstacle and complete its task, without needing a human operator.
Courtesy of UBC Applied Science
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Dive Brief:
A team of researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver demonstrated how its collection of robots could work autonomously on an actual jobsite, per a UBC news release, a preview that one professor called a glimpse into the future.
The team at UBC’s Smart Structures Lab showed the tech off at a jobsite demonstration on Mitchell Island in Richmond, British Columbia on Nov. 14.
Camera bearing aerial drones captured details that were then used to create digital twins of the jobsite. With that “as-built” information, AI-equipped cranes and forklifts moved construction materials, such as beams and columns, around the actual site, and navigated around obstacles without needing a human operator.
Dive Insight:
The impetus for the tech’s development, Yang told Construction Dive, stemmed from the labor shortage that is stymieing contractors across the U.S. and Canada. Yang said that while the robot technology was usable and jobsite ready, it wasn’t commercially available yet.
However, the road block isn’t permanent — Yang said he expects that in the next 10 years, autonomous construction machinery will become “second nature.”
“Our goal is to ensure the workers actually become managers instead of doing the physical hard work,” Yang said. “They are controlling a machine, or they’re giving instructions to machines to do the job.”
In addition to labor, an autonomous system can also detect if workers enter an unsafe area. Yang said the software did more than 1,024 checks a second.
Yang emphasized that the goal of his research was not to take jobs away from workers. Similar claims have been met with skepticism from experts, some of whom say the future is impossible to predict.
In addition to jobsite demonstrations, Yang said that he and his team has also worked with Canadian contractors, such as Mississauga, Ontario-based Bird Construction, on solutions.
The team is also working with Canadian telecom giant Rogers on a product that would enable contractors to wrap the broader spectrum of digital construction management, from labor to machines and materials, under the umbrella of a single tech product.
Yang is also developing a fully autonomous excavator, which will use drawings to dig out the foundation of buildings without human aid.
He says his research is more “AI construction” than “AI decoration.”
“They paint the wall, they put the tiles on, but this is putting the building together,” Yang said.
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