Trials and tribulations: Vinci’s experience of robots

He noted the importance of carrying out demonstrations of robots and automation technology before trials. “We’ve done so many more demonstrations than we’ve managed to get trials – and that’s true of most [businesses]. Until you’ve done that demonstration, until people have understood it enough, they won’t [buy into] it,” he said.

“There’s this lovely theory about adoption and familiarity and newness that people like novel and new, but they also like familiar, and you have to find that sweet spot where it’s novel and new enough that they’re excited, but it’s familiar enough that it’s not very scary. Demonstrations are really helpful [for familiarisation], and then once people are more familiar with it, it’s less scary and we can move forward.”

Despite the low conversion rates from demonstration to trial and from trial to deployment, Reid was keen to not brand these as failures: “You have to reframe success and failure. It’s not a failure if we learnt something, and we wrote down or recorded in a video what we learned and we shared it, because then we haven’t lost anything. It doesn’t matter if it didn’t work. We learned something. We shared it and we can build on that next time.”

He reflected on some of the reasons for those low conversion rates. “There can be a bit of sales smoke and mirrors – it gets into the real trial, and you go, ‘I thought you said it could do this’, and they went, ‘well, yeah, in a perfect world it could do it, but not today’. But mostly, it's been failures of our understanding.

“We had a really great trial of Monumental (the brick-laying robot), a really great bit of kit. The challenges we had when we trialled it were not down to the machine. They were down to the fact that our site teams are used to working with traditional bricklayers, who, when they find something that’s maybe not quite right, they just fix it, and the site management team would never even necessarily know. However, when it’s a robot, it can’t just make it fit, and that then was the challenge. It’s a journey; it’s not straightforward.”

Asked who has to sign off on robot tests, Reid answered: “The flippant answer is lots of people. There’s health and safety at multiple levels that want to sign stuff off. Operational wants to sign stuff off. Cybersecurity is a real problem at the moment. In the wake of the fridges and freezers [attacks], any e-stop now that’s connected to the internet is raising lots of questions. Frankly, our experts don’t necessarily know what they need to ask or how to judge whether it’s safe. They haven’t learnt that yet, but [they recognise] a real tangible risk.”

At the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital project, Vinci Building’s JV with Sir Robert McAlpine (Integrated Health Projects) tested a plastering robot from Les Companions. This required sign-off from the managing director “because there was a question of ‘were we going to reduce the profitability of the project slightly’”, Reid said.

That trial highlighted an outcome that other contractors have experienced when testing robots that carry out traditional trade work. “On that project, the plastering robot only operated for four hours a day, because every day it caught up with the guys who were prepping the rooms ahead of them,” he said.

Bouygues Bâtiment International lead, sustainable design and innovation, Devani Varunika Perera, was on the same panel as Reid and she responded to that point. “What we are looking at is maybe we need to disrupt the way we organise our work, to rethink site organisation, the methods and the planning.”

She said Bouygues had trialled 20 robots in the last three years and deployed five. Bouygues now avoids the issues of testing on a live site (issues that can not only disrupt the site, but also the trial) after launching its site laboratory Scale One last month. Located near Paris, the site allows Bouygues to test innovations on a replica of a live site in real-world conditions with staff drawn from its site teams.

Watch the video of Vinci's robot test on the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital project.