Take away from ISARC 2024
I just returned from the 41 International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC) in Lille, France 🇫🇷. The conference was excellent with 6 keynote talks and more than 200 presentations. I’m so happy that I had the opportunity to meet so many colleagues and friends and even quite many most renowned researchers in construction automation.
Here are my key takeaways:
💡building information modelling and its related information technologies have been increasingly used and developed over the past years. However, automation and robotics is still at its very young age in the global construction industry.
🎈 The robotics research in construction will never be simply applying the existing systems from manufacturing industry. For example, humanoid Robots is quite popular in robotics research; however in civil and construction Engineering, they are so far considered as not suitable. Construction robots needs to address the complex, dynamic and unstructured environments, large dimensions, and heavy-load components involved in civil projects.
🔎 Industrial acceptance of construction robotics is currently low. There is a pressing need to build an ecosystem and long-term strategy, fostering collaboration between academia and industry.
📌 Our current research efforts too much focus on Technology development rather than the fundamental problems observed in real world practices. While the latter, ie the problem, is more important.
📈 digital twin, construction 5.0 and human-Robot collaboration and robots for modular construction are hot topics, with significant considerations around safety, efficiency, and cost.
Huge thanks to the organising team led by Zoubeir LAFHAJ and the scientific committee Vicente A. Gonzalez Jiansong Zhang Borja GarcÃa de Soto for your hard work! Lille and ISARC 2024 are perfect!
Looking forward to the next ISARC in mid 2025 in Montreal, Canada 🇨🇦!
