Video games deliver robotics to construction

New Orleans, La.—Curious about the convergence of robotics and construction? Look no further than your games console.

The dynamic nature of video games, where a player interacts with the environment and tasks are calculated in the background, has direct applications to construction, said Julie Pithers of DIRTT Environmental Solutions at a session during the Canadian Construction Association’s 98th annual conference in New Orleans, La.

"In the background of a game, all the data is being figured out, whether it’s your ammo or your score, and in the real world when you’re actually building something, it’s your price, it’s how do you make this thing, how do you get it through the factory and onto the site," Pithers said.

University of Waterloo civil and environmental engineering professor Carl Haas also spoke at the session and agreed that video game technology has driven innovation in construction.

"There are now $200 to $300 scanners that sense in 3D in real time at a video rate. Nobody was going to invest in that except the gaming industry, and yet that has incredible applications outside gaming," Haas said.

Haas worked on early construction robotics initiatives in the 1980s and ’90s, and said that while the technology wasn’t powerful enough at the time, "like the space program, a lot of good things came out of it."

"We had all the basic ingredients in the ’80s, and the reason you don’t see these systems today has more to do with business than technical facility," he added.

In the early stages of automation, robots lacked the sensors that would make them adaptable to their surroundings, and were used for repetitive tasks. Heavy equipment is one of the areas that moved quickly to autonomous vehicles, Haas said.

"Heavy equipment vehicles are already like a robot, you just need to add the control system," he said.

Haas’s research has since pivoted from heavy equipment to bringing more intelligence to the construction site through modelling and integration of data. Accelerating computational power has allowed for more sophisticated modelling and customization at every stage of a building project.

"That’s what makes construction unique," Pithers said. "Making the same thing over and over is not what people want in their lives, particularly in buildings they’re going to live in. So finally, the worlds have come together where the technology is sophisticated enough and people are really ready to embrace it."

"Technology has become so sophisticated that you can give it enough data and it’s so fast that it’s able to process it all, and understand all the things that range from physics to whether a fabric is available. All those things can be captured now at once," she said.

In the past different stakeholders and types of software couldn’t communicate, Haas said, but tighter system integration is opening up new construction possibilities.

"Now all that is finally coming together, we can image and process in 3D, and construction is a 3D world, so that computing and sensing power has been transformative," Haas said.