Now more than ever we are seeing increasing housing pressure on residents in the UK. Prices are increasing, buyers are being locked out of securing permanent homes, and demand outweighs supply. The construction industry must build more homes to meet this need and ease the UK housing crisis.

Modernising construction

Manufacturing has been quicker to adopt robotics and automation. Using robotics for certain parts of the construction process can streamline and increase our output.

We demonstrated this large opportunity on a smaller scale in our project alongside Glulam Solutions and Robert Gordon University, where we prototyped one of these processes for pre-fabricating and automating production. We connected these two parties together to make the project possible - from funding to management to delivery in the factory. Glulam Solutions, a manufacturer of Glulam and CLT engineered timber structures, sought to explore how a pre-fabricated CLT joint could help them build more homes. 

Homes at mass scale

The project consisted of a series of prototypes built offsite by robotic fabrication, made at our Innovation Factory using our industrial robot. The joint was developed for CLT panels, the finished rendered CLT panels were robotically fabricated, and the final joint was able to be assembled in a completed house design.

Processes like this would allow buildings to be constructed at mass scale using Scottish CLT, demonstrating our ability to build low-cost, small-scale, CLT buildings entirely off site, in part using robotics.