Construction robots are developing rapidly! Beijing has over 1,500 projects building smart construction sites

Recently, the Beijing Construction Engineering Safety Quality and Smart Management Benchmark Site Observation and Learning Activity was launched. The first observation activity was held at the China Petroleum Exploration and Development Engineering Technology R&D Center Project, a benchmark construction site in Beijing. The project not only applied BIM technology, real-time dynamic measurement technology and other digital construction methods, but also applied 7 types of construction robots to improve construction efficiency.

Construction robots were widely used in the project, with a coverage rate of 90% for putty coating robots, 95% for indoor spraying robots , and 95% for ground leveling robots, showing people what smart construction looks like.

The efficiency of construction robots is also far superior to that of manual labor. The on-site manager introduced an indoor spraying robot, which is four times more efficient than manual labor. It is used to apply primer and topcoat to the interior walls and ceilings of Building 3 of the project. It takes about 20 minutes to spray 25 square meters of wall, and it is more even than manual spraying.

Wei Jixiang, chief engineer of the Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Development Commission and director of the Municipal Supervision Station, said that the Beijing Construction Project Safety Quality and Smart Management Benchmark Site Observation and Learning Activities have been held for three years. In recent years, the city's safety and quality management level has improved to a certain extent, and the construction of smart sites has made great progress. He said that as of the first quarter of this year, more than 1,500 projects in the city have created smart sites, an increase of 952 from 2021, accounting for 47% of the city's ongoing projects.

The market potential of construction robots is broad

The construction industry is a labor-intensive industry, and labor costs have a great impact on the operating costs of construction companies. With the increasing aging of the population, the safety issues of high-altitude operations in construction are becoming increasingly prominent. According to statistics from the Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau, there were 734 production safety accidents in housing and municipal engineering projects across the country in 2021, of which 383 were high-altitude fall accidents, accounting for 52% of the total number of accidents. The labor costs in the construction industry have been further raised.

With the trend of intelligence, replacing manual work with robot automation has become a trend. Robots are gradually being deployed on construction sites around the world. Their applications range from automated bricklaying, 3D printing to on-site surveying. These robots have proven their ability to perform tasks faster and more accurately than human workers.

The market opportunities for construction robots are huge. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the gross domestic product of the construction industry has continued to expand over the past decade. From 2012 to 2021, the total output value of my country's construction industry has continued to rise from 13.7 trillion yuan to 29.3 trillion yuan, and the added value accounted for 7% of the gross domestic product; in 2021, the national construction industry's housing construction area was 15.75 billion square meters, a year-on-year increase of 5.4%.

However, my country's construction methods are still very backward, and digital applications account for a very small proportion. Statistics from the China Construction Association show that China's investment in building informatization accounts for only 0.08% of the total output value of the construction industry, while developed countries in Europe and the United States account for about 1%, which means that my country still has a lot of room for development.

Still, whether the construction industry is ready to accept and use robots is a question that needs to be considered. On the one hand, it may be challenging for many construction companies to allocate resources for robots while dealing with declining margins and profitability. On the other hand, adopting robots is not as simple as plug and play. Construction companies may have to completely replan or redesign their workflows to make the most of robots.

For construction, an old industry that has long relied on manual labor, it is not easy to transform the process into automation. However, the use of automation to reduce costs and increase efficiency is also an inevitable trend in various industries today, and the construction industry is no exception. According to McKinsey Global Institute, by switching to a manufacturing production system, the productivity of certain parts of the construction industry may increase by 5-10 times.