Living of the future – with the help of robotics and automation
Housing shortages, rising rents, and housing crises in large cities are pressing global problems. The solution? Require new technologies.
Teresa Scheunert
2025? 8? 27?
Society
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Affordable housing, built as sustainably as possible: this is one of the most important social issues of our time and has the potential to cause social unrest. Complex approval procedures, rising prices, and an outdated construction industry are just three reasons for the increasingly serious housing shortage in many countries.
"The construction industry has hardly evolved in the last 50 years; much of the work on construction sites is still done by hand. This poses enormous challenges for the industry. Without a fundamental transformation of the construction industry, the pressing problem of housing shortages cannot be solved," says Timo Heil, CEO of KUKA's plant engineering division for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Flexible automation – now applicable in construction
But how can houses and apartments be built faster and more cheaply? Serial production and modular construction are the key here. At first glance, this is not a new concept – but combined with automation and digitalization, this new type of construction can revolutionize the industry.
“Automated house construction largely shifts the construction site to the factory – with the help of robotics, entire apartment elements are produced on the assembly line in a highly automated and digitalized process, which then only need to be assembled on the construction site,” says Timo Heil, explaining the innovative concept that has only become possible thanks to rapid technological advances in the automation market.
Software, robotics, and automation have now become so flexible that we at KUKA can transfer our decades of automation and plant expertise to the construction industry. This offers enormous potential. And we're not talking about standardized, gray prefabricated buildings, but modern living space in all its variations – significantly cheaper, more efficient, and faster to build.
First house building factory in southern Germany
And the concept of “living space on the assembly line” is no longer just a theory: GROPYUS's first house construction factory is now located in Richen, Germany. In KUKA's highly automated production facility, 50 KUKA robots manufacture wall and ceiling elements on two production lines using digitally controlled processes and over 120 specially developed robot tools. The goal: a cost-efficient, environmentally friendly, and fully digitally controlled construction method.
A look inside Gropyus' state-of-the-art house construction factory
GROPYUS develops and produces multi-story, sustainable apartment buildings using timber construction methods on an industrial scale at its smart factory in Richen. These buildings are planned entirely digitally, manufactured using highly automated processes, and then assembled on construction sites, partly using automated methods.
Innovative end-to-end digitalization optimizes the entire construction process - from planning and production to construction and building operation. This enables GROPYUS to reduce construction time by up to 50 percent compared to conventional construction methods.
The new house construction factory can produce around 3,500 apartments per year, representing a gross floor area of 250,000 square meters. This is a real milestone in the construction of the future, sustainable and efficient – thanks to the use of automation and robotics.
Innovation at a glance: How automated modular housebuilding works
