Identifying the Challenges to Adopting Robotics in the US Construction Industry

Abstract

The construction industry has been plagued with a labor shortage, poor productivity, high material wastage, and unsafe working conditions predominantly due to monotonous and labor-intensive activities. Unlike construction, other industries have successfully adopted prefabrication, automation, and robotics to enhance their productivity, safety, and sustainability throughout their processes. However, the construction industry is unable to fully integrate such groundbreaking technologies due to various challenges. To date, there is scarce research that identifies and documents the existing barriers to the usage of robotics, particularly within the United States construction industry, thus impeding the mainstream adoption of robotics due either to a lack of identifying such challenges or poor understanding of them. The goal of this study is to identify the documented barriers to adopting robotics in the US construction industry, which in turn can support a profound understanding of such barriers as well as informing the construction industry and academic researchers about how to look for solutions for these barriers. This effort of identifying the challenges to using robotics is the foundation to support and advance the adoption of such technology by, for example, fulfilling the need to provide robotic training for the future US workforce. To achieve this goal, this research targeted high-quality journals from ASCE as well as the ScienceDirect library and, as a result, identified 14 unique barriers through a critical literature review of 291 research articles published between the years 1980 and 2020. The study specifies unique findings that contribute to construction management, including planning, productivity, practices, workforce education and development, and construction automation, bodies of knowledge by identifying the challenges behind the uncertain adoption of robotics in the US construction industry. The findings of this research are also critical to the profession in terms of understanding the myths associated with the uncertainty impacts of using robotics in relation to our future workforce. The US construction industry needs to initially realize the benefits, target the barriers based on difficulty of resolution, and then exploit opportunities through addressing the barriers that impede the integration of robotics, which could ultimately bring about a sustainable paradigm shift in construction practices.