6. February 2022
The Reference Construction Site celebrates its second anniversary
It is now two years, that Prof. Dr. Dr. Ulrich Rüdiger from RWTH Aachen University handed over a 10,000 sqm space to the Center Construction Robotics.
Its goal was to establish a broad international network with strong partners for research, industry, and teaching collaborations on the transformation of construction. After two years, the results exceed expectations. In the Center Construction Robotics, an interdisciplinary team of scientists from RWTH Aachen University conducts research together with an European industry consortium. It serves simultaneously as a think tank and a livinglab. Here, new construction processes, construction products, networked machines, robots for construction, software solutions and teaching, working and communication concepts are being tested under real conditions. At the same time, the Chair of Individualized Production (iprwth) headed by Prof. Dr. Sigrid Brell-Cokcan launched the international master’s program in Construction & Robotics. The students are not only taught digitalization and automation in theory, but they can also implement it into practice on the Reference Construction Site.
Thus, this project is clearly unique from other initiatives due to its #interdisciplinary approach and its practical relevance: “Only by combining the knowledge and expertise of different disciplines such as mechanical engineering, computer science, civil engineering and architecture will we be able to comprehensively recreate a new digital construction environment and the transformation of traditional methods,” says Prof. Dr. Sigrid Brell-Cokcan. The first master’s students will finish at the end of this semester.
Within the last years, real life demonstrators and patented technology was created, and numerous consortium projects have been established. The ideas that are jointly born here also gain the trust of donators and public institutions, such as the research project ‘Internet of Construction (IoC), which is coordinated by the Chair of Individualized Production at RWTH Aachen University and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Since the launch of this collaboration, the Reference Construction Site has been attracting more and more industry partners. The consortium includes prestigious companies such as Liebherr Tower Crances, PORR, Hilti, EIFFAGE, Saint-Gobain, KUKA, Autodesk, Doka, Leonhard Weiss, Xella, ALIMAK, Fundermax and Riegl. They support the reference construction site financially, infrastructurally and with practical expertise.