HP Inc. has announced HP SitePrint, a robot that prints the most complex construction site layouts with pinpoint accuracy, in a fraction of the time it takes manually – improving productivity by as much as ten times. HP SitePrint will be available to customers in North America through an Early Access Program, starting September 2022.
At $11.4 trillion, the construction sector represents 13 percent of the world’s GDP and shows a steady growth of 3.5% CAGR. Despite this, the industry faces challenges in productivity and human resourcing. While labor productivity in manufacturing has grown an average 3.6 percent a year over the past two decades, the construction sector has only seen a 1 percent increase over the same time period, according to McKinsey.
“Technology adoption and increased digitization can help construction firms realize productivity gains,” said Daniel Martínez, VP and General Manager, HP Large Format Printing. “HP has played a key role in bridging digital and physical worlds with print solutions for architects and engineers over the last thirty years. With HP SitePrint, we’re making it faster and easier than ever for construction professionals to bring an idea to life on site, while also providing layout accuracy and reducing costs derived from reworks.”
HP SitePrint is an end-to-end suite of technologies designed to automate the site layout process, consisting of a rugged and autonomous robotic device designed to operate in the conditions of the construction site. Light and compact, it is transportable, including a hard case that fits all the solution components
It also contains cloud tools to submit and prepare jobs to be printed, manage the fleet and track usage; A touch screen tablet for remote control and configuration; A portfolio of inks for different surfaces, environmental conditions, and durability requirements.
The robots is designed for autonomous operation, including obstacle avoidance, HP SitePrint can improve the productivity of the site layout process. It can print lines and complex objects with pinpoint accuracy and consistent repeatability, while text printing capabilities bring additional data from the digital model to the construction site, improving communication between construction professionals.
“The existing manual layout process can be slow and labor intensive. Despite being done by specialists, there is always the risk of human error, which can result in costly reworks,” said Albert Zulps, Director of Emerging Technology at Skanska – a global construction and development company currently utilizing HP SitePrint on two prominent US projects. “Layout experts are a scarce resource who add a lot of value in terms of planning and strategy, but often end up dedicating most of their time to manual execution. HP SitePrint lets us do more with less, helping reduce schedules thanks to a much faster layout process, and allowing senior operators to focus on other critical activities like quality control.”
The precise positioning and navigation of HP SitePrint on the job site are achieved by linking to a Robotic Total Station. HP and Leica Geosystems, part of Hexagon, have collaborated to integrate HP SitePrint with the Leica TS16 and Leica iCON iCR80 Robotic Total Stations.
