Connecting Digital and Physical Habitats

The UK spends over £30Bn per year on labour intensive construction processes, manually putting one brick on top of another, casting concrete in situ, plastering, rendering, carpentry, roofing or shaping and fixing pre made elements and façades to the building. Heavy dependence on labour and severe shortages of skilled workers not only increases the cost of construction but also impacts timescales, constrains productivity, and limits output. This creates a distinct business opportunity to improve productivity and reduce costs by adopting digital processes and large scale additive manufacturing.

Therefore a unique digital additive manufacturing process, enabled by robotic tools, is proposed that will reduce the cost of construction and increase productivity, upskill the workforce, and break the direct link between labour and output.

Q-Bot the lead partner is already disrupting one part of the construction sector -- retrofit insulation -- with its cutting edge remote insulation deposition under existing timber floors. Thanks to this innovation, as well as market leading capabilities in construction robotics, Q-Bot can offer a much better performing insulation service at a fraction of the cost. This proves that advanced deposition technology (combined with autonomous scanning and mapping) can already provide a viable alternative to labour intensive and disruptive construction processes.

Q-Bot is joined by PRP, one of the UK's leading architecture practises with more than fifty years' experience in designing award winning buildings and developing new processes for use in the construction industry.

The project consortium's unique blend of material science, construction and robotics knowledge combined with experience successfully applying this approach in an existing retrofit application, provides a unique opportunity to create a large scale digital additive manufacturing process for buildings. With help from InnovateUK the existing technology will be developed with further significant innovation for the construction market and create the next generation of 'Advanced & Connected Construction Tools'.