Barriers to the Adoption of Robot-Assisted Construction Approach in the South African Built Environment

Robotics has developed and thrived in every modern sector other than the built environment since the mid-twentieth century. Robots are intelligent mechanisms that can be modified to do tasks autonomously. Although construction robots have been around since the 1960s and 1970s, the built environment falls behind other sectors in innovation adoption, in which robotics is no exception. This study adopts a quantitative research approach to understand why the built environment is slow to implement robotics in construction operations. Questionnaires were distributed to professionals in the South African built environment to extract their opinion on the barriers to the usage of the robot-assisted construction approach. A total of 124 respondents participated in the study, and retrieved data were analyzed using mean score, standard deviation, and normalized mean value. Findings from the study revealed that the main barriers to adopting a robot-assisted construction approach are risk of job loss caused by technology, high cost of acquiring technology, and high cost of maintaining technology. It was concluded that developing countries like South Africa have the majority of their unskilled labours employed by the built environment. This has led to the sector’s slow approach to digital innovations, as humans risk job loss when adopting robots. It was recommended that awareness of the advantages of the robot-assisted construction approach should be raised to improve its adoption in the built environment of developing countries.