Disrupting construction: five technologies that are changing the industry

Digital twins

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, con­struc­tion firms only deliv­ered the build­ing itself. If it didn’t leak when it rained and the doors and win­dows opened and shut, then effec­tive­ly your job was done and you moved on to the next project. But in the mod­ern world there’s also a dig­i­tal ver­sion of that build­ing to deliv­er — its dig­i­tal twin — which is arguably just as impor­tant as the phys­i­cal build­ing.

These twins go beyond 3D mod­els by pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion on, for exam­ple, the mate­r­i­al a wall is made of, where it came from, whether there’s a cav­i­ty inside of it, and much more. But to get to this point you need to do the hard work of build­ing up and organ­is­ing the data that informs dig­i­tal twins.

On the con­struc­tion side, new skills are also need­ed to deliv­er them, so indi­vid­u­als with infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and mod­el­ling abil­i­ties may need to be added to exist­ing teams. But dig­i­tal twins are caus­ing more dis­rup­tion dur­ing the oper­a­tions phase of the build­ing.

Facil­i­ties main­te­nance teams need data on how the build­ing is func­tion­ing to do their job effec­tive­ly — and pre­vi­ous­ly they haven’t had much to go on. So a dig­i­tal ver­sion of the build­ing that can be hand­ed over post-con­struc­tion is real­ly dis­rup­tive.

3D printing

3D print­ing (oth­er­wise known as addi­tive man­u­fac­tur­ing) is already quite wide­ly used in the con­struc­tion indus­try. One of the main ben­e­fits is repeata­bil­i­ty. For exam­ple, if you have ten print­ers run­ning through the night pro­duc­ing con­struc­tion com­po­nents, and the qual­i­ty of those com­po­nents is up to stan­dard, that’s poten­tial­ly as rev­o­lu­tion­ary for the con­struc­tion indus­try as the Ford assem­bly line was for man­u­fac­tur­ing. 

What makes this tech­nol­o­gy even more excit­ing is the poten­tial to move it on-site. Think about it: if you’re build­ing 100 instances of some­thing 50 miles from the site where they’re need­ed, you’ll even­tu­al­ly need to trans­port them there. But if you move the 3D print­er to the site instead, you elim­i­nate that need, which reduces logis­tics costs, traf­fic and emis­sions.

Although 3D print­ing used to be lim­it­ed to sil­i­cone and plas­tic mate­ri­als, print­ers that can print with met­al are also becom­ing avail­able, which rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant advance in the tech­nol­o­gy. At the same time, the print­ers them­selves are also becom­ing larg­er. In fact, there are projects in the UAE where 3D print­ers are pro­duc­ing eight by twelve-meter wall sec­tions, in met­al, in a mat­ter of hours, which are then being used in sky­scrap­ers. 

AR & VR

Both these tech­nolo­gies are dis­rup­tive, but AR is more applic­a­ble today because it deals with the inter­sec­tion between the phys­i­cal world and the dig­i­tal one. So if you have an exist­ing space and you want to see how cer­tain changes to it might look, you can use AR glass­es or a phone app to over­lay those changes onto it — and that’s clear­ly use­ful in the con­struc­tion indus­try.

For exam­ple, you could vis­it a half-fin­ished build­ing, put on some AR glass­es and see where a wall is going to extend out from. But you could also click on a phys­i­cal win­dow or oth­er object to view infor­ma­tion about it, which is anoth­er strong use case for the tech­nol­o­gy.

VR, on the oth­er hand, is pure­ly dig­i­tal. It allows you to immerse your­self in a space before it exists in the phys­i­cal world. That means you can see not only how it will look, but how peo­ple might inter­act with it too. You can then make any nec­es­sary changes to the design before you build it. That’s very impor­tant in the con­struc­tion indus­try, because the soon­er you can make changes the bet­ter.

Robotics and automation

Mod­ern assem­bly lines incor­po­rate robot­ics in var­i­ous ways, and sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies are becom­ing increas­ing­ly preva­lent in con­struc­tion — a trend that will con­tin­ue to grow as the num­ber of off-site con­struc­tion facil­i­ties increas­es. But we also need to ensure that these robots can safe­ly work along­side humans on-site, which is a more chal­leng­ing envi­ron­ment than a fac­to­ry floor.

How­ev­er, robots can actu­al­ly help to improve on-site safe­ty too. That’s impor­tant giv­en that health and safe­ty, which the con­struc­tion indus­try hasn’t always excelled at his­tor­i­cal­ly, is a key con­cern today. For instance, using robots for work at height can help to pre­vent acci­dents. Or you could use a robot with a cam­era to assess the safe­ty of cer­tain loca­tions so you know exact­ly what you’re deal­ing with before any work begins.

Look­ing fur­ther ahead, there’s no rea­son why we can’t send robots to a site to build what needs to be built. But there are always unfore­seen cir­cum­stances that humans can adapt to, so these robots will need to be capa­ble of adapt­ing as well — and that will require AI.

Smart materials

Smart mate­ri­als encom­pass things like self-heal­ing con­crete — i.e. con­crete embed­ded with micro­cap­sules con­tain­ing var­i­ous heal­ing agents to autonomous­ly repair cracks — as well as more sus­tain­able mate­ri­als, which are par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant giv­en that approx­i­mate­ly 40% of glob­al car­bon emis­sions come from the built envi­ron­ment. In oth­er words, smart mate­ri­als have a sig­nif­i­cant role to play in help­ing us to build a bet­ter world.

The mate­ri­als used with­in a build­ing can also be “smart” in the sense that they’re capa­ble of receiv­ing and trans­mit­ting infor­ma­tion about them­selves and the wider envi­ron­ment. That could be some­thing as sim­ple as a brick con­tain­ing a sen­sor that can detect when there’s a fire near­by, or if there’s too much air­flow around it. 

In fact, there are count­less dif­fer­ent sen­sors you can use to gen­er­ate use­ful data. So if you imag­ine hun­dreds of thou­sands of them embed­ded through­out a build­ing, you can see how smart mate­ri­als con­nect the phys­i­cal world with the dig­i­tal one, and feed into the very first dis­rup­tive tech­nol­o­gy men­tioned in this piece: the dig­i­tal twin.