Safety, quality, schedule, and cost impacts of ten construction robots

Robots have increased productivity, quality, and safety in structured manufacturing environments while lowering production costs. In the last decade, advances in computing and sensing have started to enable robots in unstructured environments such as construction.

Given this new reality, this research aims to quantify the impacts of existing construction robots.

This study evaluates the Safety, Quality, Schedule, and Cost impacts of ten on-site construction robots for 12 construction projects spanning 11 contractors from Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States.

The robots showed the potential to reduce repetitive site work between 25 and 90% and reduce time spent on hazardous tasks by 72% on average. On average, accuracy was improved by 55%, and rework was reduced by over 50%. Robots reduced the schedule on average 2.3 times with a median of 1.4x. The cost was reduced by 13%, with six cases that reduced it but four that increased the total costs. The comparative results also highlight under what project conditions (Product, Organization, and Process) could the robot perform better than the traditional method.

Even at this relatively early stage of robot deployment worldwide, the consistent evaluation of ten examples showed how promising the technology already is for a range of robot types, mobility, autonomy, scale, business models, and locations. Future work will expand the number of robot case studies utilizing the same comparison method.