project delivery
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Depicted in 2038, construction workers and cobots work together maintaining the façade of the King Abdullah Financial District Metro Hub in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. LiDAR-equipped drones inspect the structure, feeding data to the building’s cloud-hosted digital twin. Image: Newtecnic
Design and construction disconnect The construction industry’s move toward robotics and mass- customization brings designers and makers together for positive
Local skills and materials Rather than design components and have them made in remote facto- ries to be delivered and then assembled onsite, Newtecnic facilitates the use of temporary construction labs where local skilled craftspeople using locally sourced materials deploy advanced production machin- ery. These small but efficient manufacturing cells are dedicated to producing mass-customized components. And as robots become more advanced, they will interact with construction labs, generating, mov- ing, and installing both new and replacement building parts. Large-scale projects that Newtecnic is currently partnering on have been specifically developed to facilitate the use of robots and automa- tion. For example, the KingAbdullah Financial District (KAFD) Metro Hub in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was engineered by Newtecnic for main- tenance by robots and with future onsite component production very much in mind. We are currently overseeing construction of the building envelope. In this role, we examine and approve the work of several contractors ensuring the project is completed efficiently and accurately. Our remit also ensures that all building components and fabrications are quality assured before they are brought to the site. This detailed and long-term overview allows us to future proof the building by design engineering for different types of current and envisaged developments of robots, drones, 3D printing, and additive manufacturing for decades of maintenance to come.
disruption within and beyond the industry. By Andrew Watts, FICE FIED FIET FRSA RIBA
Digitalization, robotics, and automation have produced significant quality and productivity benefits in manufacturing over several de- cades. However, in construction, while digitalization has successfully automated design, the disconnect between designing and making is ripe for an industrial revolution. And while innovative product manufacturers use technology to move from mass-production to mass-customization, the construction indus- try is only just picking up on Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) for repetitive mass production of standardized components. This use of what can be considered an outmoded idea seems to be a retrograde step because the opportunity now exists for construction to deploy the latest technology and thereby take the lead in manufactur- ing.
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july 2018
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