The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) said on the 11th that it had applied, for the first time in the world, a construction robot technology called "remote precision placement technology for bridge girders" on an actual bridge construction site to prevent fatalities from falls at bridge construction sites.
Construction is the sector with the highest number of fatal industrial accidents in Korea. According to the Ministry of Employment and Labor, of the 584 fatal industrial accidents in 2023, construction accounted for 297 (about 50.9%), and in 2024, it accounted for 272 of 553 (about 49.2%), taking up nearly half each year.
To improve safety at construction sites, researchers in the Advanced Design and Construction Group of KICT's Structural Engineering Research Division developed a technology in which a robot, not a person, remotely and precisely adjusts the position of a girder—the main structural member of a bridge (girder: among the superstructures connecting piers and abutments, the beam that supports the deck)—to install it.
This technology uses a remote-control system installed on the ground, without work at height, to operate a remote precision placement robot that performs girder installation. The bridge used for the trial application is a girder bridge, a representative bridge type, and previously, workers had to install girders by directly adjusting their position on top of piers or abutments. During this process, workers could fall, resulting in serious injury or death.
The new technology was jointly developed with KICT at the center, together with the Korea Institute of Robot and Convergence, SB Engineering, and Dongil Engineering Consultants. Starting with concept design in 2020, in 2023 the team verified functionality and field applicability through trial application on a test-bed bridge prepared with the Korea Expressway Corporation. In September this year, the technology was experimentally applied at a bridge construction site provided by Korea National Railway.
Park Sun-gyu, president of KICT, said, "This field trial is the first case of using robots to install girders at a bridge construction site, and there are no comparable cases in Korea or overseas," adding, "By unmanning high-risk tasks, it will help create safe construction sites with zero serious accidents."