Life-cycle assessment highlights carbon reduction potential of robotic timber assembly, suggesting sustainable building practices.
Global climate change mitigation has prompted the construction sector to pursue decarbonization strategies, with timber structures offering significant carbon reduction potential. Wood serves as a sustainable material that sequesters carbon during growth while reducing emissions across the entire construction supply chain. Robotic construction of timber structures is increasingly promoted as a low-carbon, intelligent alternative for small- and medium-scale projects, yet the energy consumption and environmental impacts of robotic automated assembly using self-tapping screws remain understudied. This study presents a construction-phase life-cycle assessment (LCA) of an innovative vertically mobile robotic construction system for automated timber structure. The system integrates a KUKA KR 6 R900 (KUKA Robotics Corporation, Augsburg, Germany) six-axis robot with an electrically actuated lifting platform and specialized end-effector, enabling fully autonomous assembly of a Layered Interlaced Timber Arch-Shell (LITAS) structure using Hinoki cypress timber and self-tapping screws. This research provides the first comprehensive LCA dataset for robotic screw-fastened timber construction and establishes a replicable framework for sustainable automated building practices, with methodology scalability enabling application to diverse timber construction scenarios and advancing intelligent and decarbonized transformation in the construction industry.
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Li et al. (2025) studied this question.
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