BIM-enabled collaborative-robots 3D concrete printing to construct MiC with reinforcement

3D concrete printing (3DCP) has attracted much attention in recent years due to its advantage of advancing the conventional construction sector. However, the wide adoption of 3DCP in infrastructure and housing construction, i.e., Modular Integrated Construction, is hindered by the challenge of introducing reinforcement rebars in printed structures. This paper aims to tackle the abovementioned limitation by the application of a BIM-enabled collaborative-robots 3DCP system. In the proposed system, Building Information Modelling (BIM) and robot-arm 3D concrete printers are integrated to be a seamless information communication platform. The data of printed concrete structures and reinforcement rebars are extracted, separated, processed, and analysed on a BIM platform (i.e., Revit) by using a self-developed script. Then, these obtained data are sent to two robots to conduct different printing tasks, i.e., concurrent concrete structure printing and reinforcement rebar placement, respectively. The proposed system is successfully validated by a case study conducted in a virtual environment. This work demonstrates a seamless framework for concurrent print concrete structure and place reinforcement rebars to advance the automation of 3DCP by integrating BIM with robot-arm 3D printers.