We have had the pleasure of meeting Anurag Bansal, Innovation Manager at ACCIONA’s Construction Technology Center. Passionate about technology intelligence, open innovation, and result exploitation, with a very extensive and exciting background.
“We foresee our HumanTech technologies to improve the health and safety of on-site construction workers and increase productivity through increasing work efficiency.”
Q: Anurag, tell us a bit about your organisation, ACCIONA. What does it do, and what’s its primary focus?
A: ACCIONA Construccion has over 100 years of experience developing civil engineering infrastructure projects. It offers sustainable solutions in bridge engineering, tunnels, and special transport structures, as well as in ports, airports, airport services, forwarding, and developing telecommunications transmission networks and data centres with high efficiency and low environmental impact. It is present in all phases of the value chain of these infrastructure construction projects and transport solutions.
Our focus is to
- accelerate the industrialisation & digitalisation of civil construction,
- enhance the positive externality impacts of each infrastructure asset delivered and increase our overall portfolio’s long-term operations share.
Q: Ambitious goals, for sure! Now, let us know about your role at HumanTech. What do you do, and what two activities are you working on that excite you the most?
A: At ACCIONA, we are leading two of the five pilots planned within the scope of HumanTech for validating different technologies, such as human-robot collaboration and exoskeletons. Within these pilots, we will directly compare how things are done currently/conventionally and how they could be done using HumanTech technologies.
Some of the activities we are working on that I am most excited about are
- the validation of novel technologies that could later be integrated with our lines of business,
- and connecting with new partners with whom we could develop future alliances.
Q: What milestones do you expect to achieve through HumanTech? And what positive impact do you expect it to generate?
A: I hope we can validate the HumanTech technologies within the project’s timeframe and further explore the possibility of replicating them in other work sites after the end of HumanTech.
If the technologies can deliver results as promised, we foresee:
- An improvement in the health and safety (H&S) of on-site workers. E.g. exoskeletons could help workers lift heavy weights, reducing the risk of potential injuries.
- An increase in productivity through increasing work efficiency.
“I hope we can validate the HumanTech technologies within the project’s timeframe and further explore the possibility of replicating them in other work sites after the end of HumanTech.”
Q: These are much-needed improvements for the construction sector and its workers. And what do you think about the industry’s sustainability challenges? Is there a net zero future for construction?
A: The industry is paving the way to reach net zero in the near future. However, considerable investments are required from the main actors in its value chain to achieve this goal. In addition, technologies need to be ready and adapted for use by the industry’s workers.
“The industry is paving the way to reach net zero in the near future. However, considerable investments are required from the main actors in its value chain to achieve this goal.”
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