The global construction industry is shifting towards sustainable practices to address environmental concerns and meet evolving regulations, with the civil construction sector under pressure to enhance economic, social, and environmental sustainability.
Robotics and automated solutions play a significant role in this sense, as they are capable of addressing these issues, including inefficiencies and low productivity as well, but their adoption in construction is still very low in comparison with other sectors, mainly due to high costs, interoperability issues between systems, safety concerns and resistance to change.
In response to this limited adoption, the RADIANCE project seeks to transform construction and renovation by integrating advanced robotics, automation and digitalization solutions, and establishing a new standard for workflows that enhance safety, efficiency, and sustainability while reducing costs, errors, time, and environmental impacts across Europe.
RADIANCE solutions are validated in 3 scenarios (inspection, diagnosis and renovation, human-robot interaction and safety, and construction optimization) consisting in 4 relevant environments, located in Norway, Poland and Spain, covering different construction methods and construction sites in Europe.
These results are achieved thanks to a unique consortium with expertise in: drones for inspection, diagnosis and repairing, concrete evaluation, cable-robots, worker safety, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS); logistics and environmental monitoring, quadruped robots, digital twins; building construction and sustainability.
SINTEF contributes to Human–robot collaboration & safety by developing an Augmented Reality (AR) interface for worker and worksite safety, including human-robot interaction and automated workflows in real construction environments.
In addition, the adaptation of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems will be simulated for construction robots and vehicles in a Virtual Reality setting, supported by project data, parametric models and Agent-based modelling. SINTEF leads the Nordic validation scenario “Human–robot collaboration & safety” and also contribute to the other two scenarios (“Inspection, diagnosis and renovation” and “Construction optimization and logistics”).
In Norway, the construction company Nordic Entreperør facilitates the workforce and worksites to test SINTEF developments.
The SINTEF VR Laboratory is used for simulations and test of AR interface.