Tech4EUConstruction cluster launches "Words of Innovation" campaign
What is a digital twin? What is meant by automation and environmental impact in construction? Through our Tech4Construction Cluster's "Words of Innovation" campaign, we will explore and clarify the meaning of these and other keywords and why they are relevant in today's construction sector.
Tech4Construction Cluster: Transforming Construction through Innovation and Collaboration
What will this campaign consist of? Experts from the founding projects of the Tech4Construction cluster — BEEYONDERS, HumanTech and RoBétArmé — will delve into essential and innovative aspects of their work by defining simple keywords. They will briefly explain the technologies and strategies they are developing to address the various challenges facing today's European construction industry.
Stay tuned to gain insights into the work driving the Tech4EUConstruction Cluster's innovative efforts. Join us as we unlock the vocabulary of innovation and pave the way towards a better European construction!
Keep up to date with the campaign on LinkedIn and Twitter at #Tech4EUConstruction + #WordsOfInnovation.
Jason Rambach: “HumanTech is bringing AI to construction”
How are we addressing the most important challenges in the construction industry today? How will our technologies help accelerate the sector's green and digital transformation? What positive impact will they have on the day-to-day lives of construction workers? How will our educational resources help professionals learn about them? Why is it necessary to conceive technological advances with a human-centred perspective? What will our pilots consist of and how will they feed into our projects’ technical developments?
One year after HumanTech started and having seen our first promising technical results, we wanted to know our partners' views on these and other key aspects to understand our project. So, we interviewed them at our last General Assembly Meeting in Oslo.
Ready to find out more about HumanTech and our extraordinary team?
Jason Rambach, HumanTech Project Coordinator: What is HumanTech?
For this series' first interview, we spoke with our project coordinator, Jason Rambach — a Senior Researcher and Team Leader in Spatial Sensing and Machine Perception at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).
He told us about our project’s focus, “to improve construction for its workers and society as a whole”, and our multidisciplinary team, consisting of “research institutes, construction companies, and innovative SMEs”.
Also, he explained our solutions — from exoskeletons to collaborative robots and progress monitoring tools —, combining computer vision and 3D semantic segmentation with BIM modelling to address construction workers' safety and well-being as well as environmental sustainability and efficiency in the building sector.
Stay tuned for more! Learn about how we are revolutionising the construction industry by harnessing the power of AI in upcoming interviews with the HumanTech team.
HumanTech General Assembly Meeting in Oslo
Our HumanTech team met in Oslo, Norway, from 23 to 25 August 2023 for our yearly General Assembly Meeting. Colleagues from all our 21 partner organisations came together to reconnect, share their progress so far and agree on our next steps to advance towards our goal: accelerating the construction industry's digital transformation, making it safer and greener.
Over three days, we had discussions on human-robot collaboration, wearable technology, and construction workers' perception of health and safety innovation. We also shared our main milestones and challenges since we started working together a year ago, reviewed the tasks we are currently focused on and agreed on our next steps to continue contributing to improving the European construction sector.
Our latest highlights
Some of our recent and most outstanding achievements include:
- Scientific excellence recognition: Having been awarded in the CV4AEC workshop's Scan-to-BIM challenge (3D Building Model Reconstruction) at the CVPR 2023 conference.
- Events and conferences: Having organised and participated in numerous events — from our “Human Factors in Construction Robotics” Special Session at the 19th IEEE ARSO International Conference to our participation in the International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC) and the AI for Good Global Summit — with large public attendance.
- Stakeholders focus groups: Having realised worker's technology acceptance workshops with representatives of the main stakeholders targeted by our construction technologies in Spain (Alicante and Zubieta) and Ireland (Limerick).
- Collaboration with other EU-funded projects: We joined forces with our sister projects, BEEYONDERS and RoBétArmé, to create the collaborative cluster Tech4EUconstruction to address the key challenges of the European construction sector.
Team collaboration and 1st technical demo session
In addition to updating the status of our tasks in HumanTech’s main areas — from Dynamic Semantic Twin Generation to Wearable Technologies for Construction and Construction Robotics and Human-Robot Collaboration — we held a collaborative workshop, an open session with external partners and a demonstration of our technologies.
In the Human Factors - Training and Usability Assessment collaborative workshop, partners discussed how to contribute to the training modules we will develop — aimed at upskilling and re-skilling construction professionals.
These will focus on two areas:
- Technologies supporting workers' safety and well-being in future digital construction
- Human-robot collaboration in construction automation
We also had an open session with external partners and saw the first demonstrations of our HumanTech technologies — from real-time brick tracking to an automated scan to BIM pipeline.
After these days of intense teamwork, networking, and progress sharing, we are prepared to go all out for HumanTech's next phase!
Many thanks to our colleagues at SINTEF, who organised this meeting, for being such great hosts.
In this meeting, we took the chance to record interviews with some of our partners. Stay tuned to our channels! We will be sharing them over the next weeks.