Automated Robotic Mass Production of Construction Will Limit Dangers to Human Operators and Achieve Maximum Production Efficiency T he FutureHome project [1] is a part of the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) global program [2]. This program is an industry-led, international R&D program, established in 1995, to develop the next generation of manufacturing and processing technol- ogies. Recognizing that these technologies will be expensive to produce, and that no single firm has all the expertise needed, companies and research institutions from Australia, Canada, the Euro- pean Union (EU), Japan, Switzer- land, and the United States have undertaken cooperative technol- ogy development to share costs, risks, and expertise. Over 250 companies and over 200 research institutions are currently active across an array of almost 20 ac- tive IMS projects. Due to the fact that each geographical region funds its own IMS research, the same project has different names in different regions. This article deals with the first project in construction automation and robotics. The EU part of the project is called FutureHome, and the Japanese part is desig- nated IF7. The FutureHome-IF7 project consortium is formed by leading construction companies and R&D centers from the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Finland, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Japan. This article presents the main results of the FutureHome project (1998-2001) in the area of modular house building, with an emphasis on the de- sign and assembly stages. The main objective of the FutureHome project is the de- velopment of an integrated construction automation (ICA) concept and associated technologies during all stages of the house-building construction process, from architect’s desk to site robots, including ◆ modular design of buildings, keeping in mind their robotic erection ◆ automatic planning and realtime replanning of the offsite prefab- rication, transportation, and on- site assembly ◆ onsite automatic and robotic transportation, manipula- tion, and assembly of the buildings’ prefabricated parts. Today, house-building methods are based on manual techniques that are slow, expensive, and noncoordinated. Each building continues to be unique in architecture and con- struction sense. Even though the investigation to develop new construction techniques has been important during the past years [3]-[5], there is still a long distance between the con- struction industry and other industries, such as the automobile industry. It is difficult to imagine houses being produced in the same manner as cars, but, at the same time, it is not possible to construct houses as was done 80 years ago [6]. MARCH 2002 IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 55 BY C. BALAGUER, M. ABDERRAHIM, J.M. NAVARR0, S. BOUDJABEUR, P. AROMAA, K. KAHKONEN, S. SLAVENBURG, D. SEWARD, T. BOCK, R. WING, AND B. ATKIN FutureHome: An Integrated Construction Automation Approach 1998 DIGITAL STOCK CORP. 1070-9932/02/$17.00©2002IEEE