HEAP - Autonomous Robot Capable of Constructing Stone Walls with Low-Carbon Footprint

Thursday - November 23 2023, 00:59 UTC - 1 year ago

A research team has developed an autonomous 12-ton robot that can construct stone walls using advanced technologies. This robot could help the construction industry become more efficient, reduce waste, and lower its environmental impact. The robot is capable of efficiently excavating, sorting, and stacking the materials and can create digital inventories of materials to allow for easy repurposing and reuse. This robotic building process can save up to 41% in carbon dioxide emissions and could potentially serve as a proof of concept for the future of robotic construction.

Imagine a robot that can build a wall out of rocks and rubble without any human supervision. A robot that can scan, sort, and stack the materials in a smart and eco-friendly way. A robot that can also keep track of the materials it uses, making it easy to reuse and recycle them if needed. This is not science fiction but a reality.

A team of researchers has developed a 12-ton (approximately 2,000 pounds) autonomous robot that can construct stone walls from natural and recycled materials using advanced technologies. This could help the construction industry overcome its challenges of low productivity, high waste, and labor shortages while reducing its environmental impact and improving its sustainability.

The robot, dubbed HEAP (hydraulic excavator for an autonomous purpose), uses advanced technologies such as LiDAR mapping, image segmentation, and planning algorithms. It can scan, sort, and stack boulders and concrete blocks in an efficient and — according to the researchers — in an environmentally-friendly way.

The robot, tested at two sites, was able to build a 32-foot-long (10-meter-long)| freestanding wall and a 213-foot-long (65-meter-long) retaining wall using only the materials available at the locations. The robot also created 3D digital inventories of its materials, making it easy to reuse and recycle them if the walls were no longer needed.

The researchers, led by Ryan Luke Johns, say that their robot can help address the challenges faced by the construction industry, which accounts for more than 10 percent of the world's GDP but suffers from low productivity, high waste, and labor shortages. By using robots to build with local, low-energy, natural, and recycled materials, the industry can reduce its environmental impact and improve its efficiency and sustainability.

"Beyond improvements to economic and production efficiency in building, robots also provide an opportunity to reduce the industry's environmental footprint by enabling the direct use of local, low-energy, natural, and recycled materials as alternatives to concrete," the researchers write in their paper.

The researchers also claim that their robot can save up to 41 percent of carbon dioxide emissions compared to a conventional reinforced concrete wall. They say that their robot is a proof-of-concept for the future of robotic construction, where machines can work autonomously and collaboratively to create adaptable, resilient, and circular structures.

The study was published in Science Robotics .

Study abstract .

Automated building processes that enable efficient in situ resource utilization can facilitate construction in remote locations while simultaneously offering a carbon-reducing alternative to commonplace building practices. Toward these ends, we present a robotic construction pipeline that is capable of planning and building freeform stone walls and landscapes from highly heterogeneous local materials, using a robotic excavator equipped with a shovel and gripper. Our system learns from real and simulated data to facilitate the online detection and segmentation of stone instances in spatial maps, enabling the robotic system to perform autonomous, unsupervised excavation and precision sorting operations. We demonstrate these capabilities through the creation of 32 m of freestanding stone walls and 213 m of retaining walls at two sites in Europe and provide digital inventories of material type and volume, enabling the repurposing and reuse and recycling of stone building elements within a circular economy framework. Our results experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of a highly efficient, low-carbon building process and serve as a proof of concept for the autonomous on-site construction of stone structures.