£18m funding to "transform" UK construction sector

Made through funding body UKRI, and drawn from the government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF), the cash is being ploughed into a range of projects aimed at making construction more efficient, sustainable and productive.

A key £5m chunk of the investment, from UKRI’s new Research Leaders Program, has been targeted at four new research projects aimed at speeding up assembly, saving money, and improving the quality of UK building projects.

Amongst these are a Loughborough University led project that’s exploring the development of next generation Hybrid Concrete Printing (HCP) technology to produce near-net-shape building components. The group claims that HCP technology will enable the intelligent integration of building performance and energy production and storage technologies.

Another project - led by a team at UCL and involving partners including KUKA, Arup and Buro Happold - is exploring the use of swarms of robots to collectively design and build structures.

The two other collaborative research projects awarded a share of the £5m are the University of Bath led ACORN project (Automating Concrete Construction) which is looking at using digital tools to enable a more sustainable approach to concrete use, and a University of West England led initiative that’s exploring the use of AI and augmented reality to enable engineers to make more effective use of BIM software tools.