"China's construction industry has created many of the world's first, but it also faces poor product performance, huge waste of resources, prominent safety problems, serious environmental pollution, low production efficiency and other problems."

At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, Bright Dream Robot- Jinping Project quietly did something that changed the industry ecology - it completed the first acceptance of "BIM+FMS+WMS+construction robot multi-machine construction system", which marks that construction robots have entered a new stage of systematic application with multiple machines coordinating, and China's construction industry has taken another big step towards "intelligent construction".

As the Spring Festival approaches, migrant workers have begun to return home in large numbers, and the construction industry will face a serious cyclical "labor shortage".

"It's not easy to do projects now. Although workers' salaries have generally increased, there is often a shortage of construction workers, even if the monthly salary is around 10,000 yuan." Zhang Daiwei, the head of a construction contractor, said the construction industry is also aging, with more young people "preferring to deliver packages rather than go to construction sites."

The demographic dividend is fading, and the previous model of scale growth achieved by relying on abundant and cheap labor is not sustainable. Aging, labor shortage and rising labor costs have become bottlenecks restricting the sustainable development of the construction industry.

There are fewer and older workers

China is still a "construction nation". In 2020, the total output value of the country's construction industry reached 26.4 trillion yuan, accounting for 25.88% of the gross domestic product (GDP). However, the National Bureau of Statistics' 2020 Migrant Workers Monitoring Survey Report also delivered a pessimistic message, with the total number of migrant workers nationwide falling by 5.17 million from the previous year, or 1.8 percent year-on-year.

The construction industry is an old industry, and its practitioners are not only getting fewer and fewer, they are also getting older. The report also shows that the average age of China's migrant workers in 2020 will be 40.8 years old, 0.6 years higher than in 2019. Among them, migrant workers over the age of 50 account for more than 24 percent.

Leaving their hometowns, living in makeshift shelters, and facing high safety risks is the norm for construction workers in China and around the world. At the age of 16, Zhang Daiwei, now 49, went to work on a construction site with his father. He vividly remembers the summer when the sun burned off his skin, and the winter when his hands and feet often got frostbitten, causing him to itch and hurt at night when he was in bed. "It would be great if there was a robot to carry bricks," Zhang said, amused by his own idea after watching a Hollywood science fiction movie one year. Who would spend a lot of money to develop a robot to carry bricks?

The construction industry is one of the industries with a low degree of digitalization and automation in the world, and there have always been drawbacks such as low technical content, poor production efficiency, high construction cost, serious environmental pollution, and large construction safety risks. Most of China's construction enterprises are "big but not good", and most of them still stay at the level of "moving bricks, tying steel bars, pouring concrete and installing templates". Faced with the labor shortage crisis, China's real estate and construction companies represented by Country Garden are looking for a turnaround.

Today, Country Garden has used nearly three years of practice to prove that the era of "robot building houses" has come. A building cleaning robot works at the Fengtong Garden project in Shunde, Foshan, Guangdong province, in December 2021. Workers nicknamed him "big Eyes." It has a pair of cute big eyes, and wherever it goes, dust, debris, small stones and other site garbage are swept away. "The building cleaning robot is equipped with lidar, ultrasonic sensors, and multi-sensor fusion technology such as collision strips." The scene personnel introduced.

This "artifact" can not only autonomously plan paths, autonomously navigate, autonomously clean and automatically dump garbage in the construction scene, but also intelligently avoid obstacles, and the cleaning efficiency is three times that of humans. Construction site cleaning has always been a difficult bone to chew, not only small stones and dust are difficult to clean, but also artificial cleaning efficiency is low, high cost, and will cause "pneumoconiosis" and other health hazards to construction personnel.

The characters of past science fiction movies, such as measuring robots, intelligent follow-up fabric machines and concrete ceiling grinding robots, are becoming a reality in Country Garden's Fengtong Garden project.