Potential Savings: A summary of the direct costs (labor and equipment) is given in the attached table and reflects building a plant in a conventional way. This table also shows the potential savings that might be achieved by: A. Keeping labor input constant and doubling equipment usage or productivity B. Eliminating all direct construction labor and incurring charges for robot or automated assembly equipment equal to equipment rental charges that would be incurred by using present construction practices C. Similar to case B but doubling the productivity by using the robots 16 hours per day Status of Technologies Needed to Produce Construction Robots: To design and assemble a construction robot economically and with little effort various technologies must be sufficiently advanced to permit that effort to proceed without incurring a large development cost. The technologies involved are: • Industrial automation • Microprocessors • Remotely piloted vehicle technology • Autonomous planetary rovers In all cases, the techniques needed to give a construction robot the necessary capabilities have been demonstrated either in actual working environments or field tests of prototype equipment. A fairly brief review of the literature in each of these fields will verify this statement. In tasks involving uncertainty, one weak area is in the software routines involved in giving the robots limited decision making capabilities. Until more advanced software routines become available, construction robots may be limited to assembly and transportation tasks. Two conceptual designs are shown in the attached figures.
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