On 5 and 6 September, EBC travelled to Ireland, for the General Assembly of the Horizon Europe initiative HumanTech, whose efforts are geared towards developing human centred technologies for a safer and greener European construction industry.
The meeting was hosted by the Technical University of the Shannon (TUS), which welcomed the 22 partners in the city of Athlone. Building on the positive feedback received last January in the occasion of the mid-term review meeting, the partners discussed the final stretch of the project, aiming at digitalisation of the construction sector with cutting-edge, human-centred technologies.
Parts of the discussion focused on the workers’ understanding of robotics and technological innovation, their innovative added value for health and safety in construction sites, their training needs and overall consideration of the cooperation between human and robot. Among others, updates regarding robotic grasping, teleoperated mastic applications and BIM visualizations overlaid over real building in augmented reality were presented. In this framework, the TUS presented the state of play of the training materials developed in the project to address the need to close the skill-gap between these new technologies and the current know-how of construction workers.
Additionally, the successes and milestones achieved in terms of outreach in the sector were highlighted, with a particular attention to the ongoing collaboration within the Tech4EUconstruction cluster and other liaison activities.
EBC involvement in the EU project covers the usability assessment of the upcoming digital, wearable and robotic tools from the point of view of construction SMEs, the awareness raising on safety technologies for construction companies and the development of a training approach for the upskilling of the current and future workforce on technologies for workers’ safety, well-being, and human-robot collaboration in construction.
HumanTech is thus entering in its final sprint and the main challenge ahead regards the implementation of project’s technologies in five different demonstration sites. These pilots will be tested across diverse settings (office buildings, bridges) and countries (Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore) from late 2024 to mid-2025, the project ending in May next year.
 | For more information about the HumanTech project, visit the website: https://humantech-horizon.eu/ |