Programme: Horizon Europe

Call: HORIZON-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01

Project acronym: HumanTech

Project name: Human Centered Technologies for a Safer and Greener European Construction Industry


Project summary:
The European construction industry faces three major challenges: improve its productivity, increase the safety and wellbeing of its workforce and make a shift towards a green, resource efficient industry. To address these challenges adequately, HumanTech proposes a human-centered approach, involving breakthrough technologies such as wearables for worker safety and support, and intelligent robotic technology that can harmoniously co-exist with human workers while also contributing to the green transition of the industry.

Our aim is to achieve major advances beyond the current state-of-the-art in all these technologies, that can have a disruptive effect in the way construction is conducted by a new generation of highly skilled, male and female construction workers and engineers, working in a safe and rewarding digitally enabled environment.
These advances will include:
    • Introduction of robotic devices equipped with vision and intelligence to enable them to navigate autonomously and safely in a highly unstructured environment, collaborate with humans and dynamically update a semantic digital twin of the construction site. Visual information capturing will extend to multispectral imaging enabling detection of material composition of built structures besides geometric characteristics.
    • Intelligent unobtrusive workers protection and support equipment ranging from exoskeletons triggered by wearable body pose and strain sensors, to wearable cameras and XR glasses to provide real-time worker localisation and guidance for the efficient and accurate fulfilment of their tasks.
    • An entirely new breed of Dynamic Semantic Digital Twins (DSDTs) of construction sites simulating in detail the current state of a construction site at geometric and semantic level, based on an extended BIM formulation encompassing all relevant structural and semantic dimensions (BIMxD). BIMxDs will act as a common reference for all human workers, engineers and autonomous machines.


Starting date: 01/06/2022
Ending date: 31/05/2025
Duration: 36 months


Project partners:
    • Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (Germany) (Coordinator)
    • Hypercliq Ike (Greece)
    • Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (Germany)
    • Scaled Robotics SL (Spain)
    • Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin (Germany)
    • Sci-Track GmbH (Germany)
    • Sintef Manufacturing AS (Affiliated entity: SINTEF AS) (Norway)
    • Acciona Construccion SA (Spain)
    • STAM SRL (Italy)
    • Holo-Industrie 4.0 Software GmbH (Germany)
    • Fundacion Tecnalia Research & Innovation (Spain)
    • Catenda AS (Norway)
    • Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest (Ireland)
    • Ricoh International B.V. (Netherlands)
    • Australo Interinnov Marketing Lab SL (Spain)
    • Printstones GmbH (Austria)
    • Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy) (Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering - ICEA)
    • European Builders Confederation (Belgium)
    • Palfinger Structural Inspection GmbH (Austria)

Associated partners:
    • Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften (Switzerland)
    • Implenia Schweiz AG (Switzerland)
    • Kajima Corporation (Japan)


Grant amount: 9.146.103,00 Euro

Grant amount for Università degli Studi di Padova (Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering – ICEA): 137.500,00 Euro


Contact person at Università degli Studi di Padova (UNIPD), Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering – ICEA: Prof. Andrea Giordano