Site Automation: Automated/Robotic On-Site Factories

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 (compute-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. Logistics, Site Automation, and Robotics extends the new technology of robotics in building-component manufacturing and construction introduced in earlier volumes to on-site structured environments and on-site automated factories. This volume explores 30 different worldwide systems within a careful analytical framework in which the best conceptual features are extracted in order to help professionals and researchers develop new applications. The analytical approach splits the systems studies into a technical portion and a portion that focuses on parameters related to productivity, efficiency, and economic performance. A benefit of automated on-site factories is the integration of several stand-alone, single-task construction robots into structured on-site environments with networked machine systems to show improvements in on-site organization, integration, and material flow.