Large mass-engineered timber construction projects require placing hundreds of thousands of screw fixtures. A new collaboration sees a robot do the hard work.

At the Murdoch University campus in Perth, a new mass-engineered timber (MET) building is being erected. The project will be Western Australia’s largest MET building, but that is not what was attracting attention to the building site one day this past May. 

The reason for the television news cameras, the careful safety precautions, the interested labourers debating whether they could work faster than the new hire, dated from a conversation Pratik Shrestha CPEng, the Aurecon structural engineer leading the project, had a few years earlier. 

“We were throwing random ideas out and we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if there were robots on site?’” Shrestha recalls.

It was a “blue-sky idea”, he admits, but one that Aurecon wanted to see if it could turn into a reality. 

“One of the things that we do at Aurecon is we have quite good relationships with other universities,” Shrestha tells create. “So we said, well, let’s do a matchmaking exercise to bring in University of Technology Sydney [UTS] – who are world leaders in robotics – partner them with Murdoch University and ourselves, and let’s … see where this goes.” 

The end result was that trial run of a custom-designed robot built to deliver screw fixings on the construction site. 

Keep reading on createdigital.org.au

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