Robotic Industrialization: Automation and Robotic Technologies for Customized Component, Module, and Building Prefabrication

The Cambridge Handbooks on Construction Robotics series focuses on the implementation of automation and robot technology to renew the construction industry and to arrest its declining productivity. The series is intended to give professionals, researchers, lecturers, and students basic conceptual and technical skills and implementation strategies to manage, research, or teach the implementation of advanced automation and robot-technology-based processes and technologies in construction. Currently, the implementation of modern developments in product structures (modularity and design for manufacturing), organizational strategies (just in time, just in sequence, and pulling production), and informational aspects (computer-aided design/manufacturing or computer-integrated manufacturing) are lagging because of the lack of modern integrated machine technology in construction. The Cambridge Handbooks on Construction Robotics books discuss progress in robot systems theory and demonstrate their integration using real systematic applications and projections for off-site as well as on-site building production. In this volume, concepts, technologies, and developments in the field of building-component manufacturing – based on concrete, brick, wood, and steel as building materials and on large-scale prefabrication, which holds the potential to deliver complex components and products – are introduced and discussed. Building-component manufacturing refers to the transformation of parts and low-level components into higher-level components by highly mechanized, automated, or robot-supported industrial settings. The definitions of components are interpreted differently by different industries and even by individual companies; however, these definitions share a common element, that components are more or less a complex combination of individual preexisting parts and/or lower-level components. Pure building-component manufacturing can be distinguished from the transformation of raw materials into parts (e.g., the production of bricks or simple concrete blocks).

Thomas Bock is a professor of building realization and robotics at Technische Universität München (TUM). His research has focussed for thirty-five years on automation and robotics in building construction, from the planning, prefabrication, on-site production and utilization phases to the reorganization and deconstruction of a building. He is a member of several boards of directors of international associations and is a member of several international academies in Europe, the Americas and Asia. He consulted several international ministries and evaluates research projects for various international funding institutions. He holds honorary doctor and professorship degrees. Professor Bock serves on several editorial boards, heads various working commissions and groups of international research organizations, and has authored or coauthored more than four hundred articles.

Thomas Linner is a postdoctoral researcher in building realization and robotics and a research associate at Technische Universität München (TUM). He completed his dissertation (Dr.-Ing.) in 2013 in the field of automation and mass customization in construction with a particular focus on automated/robotic on-site factories. Dr Linner is a specialist in the area of automated, robotic production of building 'products' as well as in the conception and performance enhancement of those products through the embedding of advanced technology (service robots, microsystems technology). Today, more and more, issues related to innovation management are becoming key topics in his research. Dr Linner is a frequently invited speaker at universities such as the University of Tokyo and Cambridge University.