According to legend, the elves once roamed the German town of Cologne – hardworking household spirits who did the craftsmen’s work at night and made their daily lives easier. In today’s construction industry, such helpers would be more than welcome. Demand for housing and modern infrastructure is rising worldwide, while a shortage of skilled workers continues to delay both new construction and renovation projects. But what can we do about this?
Alice Hierholz, a doctoral researcher at the Institute for System Dynamics, prefers to rely on modern technology and ingenuity rather than fairy tales. She develops robots that assist human workers on interior construction projects. In the future, construction robots are expected to take over physically demanding, repetitive, or dangerous tasks, thereby improving efficiency, quality, and safety in interior construction. Just like elves in fairytales, these “collaborative, heterogeneous, mobile manipulators” work autonomously and as a team. Algorithms and innovative environmental sensors help robots navigate their way through complex construction site environments. They can handle a wide range of tasks and, thanks to AI methods such as reinforcement learning, they are capable of learning.
The project Alice Hierholz is working on is part of the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Transformative Architecture” (IntCDC). IntCDC represents a new approach to construction that consistently integrates digital technologies, innovative construction methods, and architecture. Within the cluster, researchers from the fields of architecture, civil engineering, manufacturing and systems engineering, computer science, robotics, and the humanities and social sciences collaborate closely to prepare the construction industry for the future.
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Lena Jauernig
Editor Research / Early Career Researchers