On 30 November and 1 December 2022, EBC flew to Athens for the second in-person meeting of the recently started Horizon Europe project HumanTech – Human Centered Technologies for a safer and greener European Construction Industry, running for 36 months.
The Hellenic peninsula set the scene for the meeting hosted by the Greek partner Hypercliq to discuss the progress of the project, the first achievements and to set the ground for the next steps to pursue the primary objective of making the European construction sector safer, greener and more efficient thanks to major cutting-edge breakthrough technologies with a human-centred approach.
After the opening of the meeting by the Project coordinator, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence’s Augmented Vision department (DFKI), the partnership took the opportunity to share the opportunities and difficulties that everyone is experiencing regarding the uptake of innovation in construction, especially sensor-equipped wearables, exoskeletons, drones, artificial intelligence or augmented reality-based tools.
The two-day meeting closed with practical Workshop on the dependencies of the 5 large-scale construction demonstration sites in Europe (Switzerland, Spain, Germany) and Japan. On these pilot sites, testing and trial activities are planned for robotic devices equipped with vision and intelligence; smart, unobtrusive workers’ protection and support equipment; and Dynamic Semantic Digital Twins.
In HumanTech, EBC is involved in the usability assessment from the point of view of construction SMEs of the upcoming technologies, in promoting the awareness on safety technologies for construction companies and in developing a training approach for the upskilling of the current and of the future workforce on technologies for workers’ safety, well-being, and human-robot collaboration in construction.
Moreover, EBC will play a key role in the EU-wide dissemination of the most relevant projects’ findings and in building partnerships and synergies with other relevant initiatives and projects, to streamline an SME-friendly approach in the increasing digitalisation of the construction sector.
Stay tuned not to miss the latest developments and findings of the partnership!
 | To learn more about the HumanTech project, visit the website here. |
 | This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement N° 101058236. |