After the Iron Sword War ends, chances are that Gaza will be rebuilt – whether by Israel or the Palestinian Authority. If the latter option is correct, there will probably be a dispute over the entry of construction materials into the Gaza Strip, since they may be used by Hamas operatives who come from Judea and Samaria (and be sure they will) and the PA itself, which is also not exactly a friend of Israel, to rebuild the terrorist infrastructure. The next invention may herald a new era in construction, which will save all these arguments.
A team of researchers from the National Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, has developed a groundbreaking technique for using an autonomous robotic bulldozer called HEAP to build dry stone walls – a construction method in which walls are built using only stones and other existing materials, without creating cement or concrete to hold the wall. Until now, this method relied exclusively on manual labor.
In a proof of concept, the researchers tasked HEAP with building a stone wall six meters high and 65 meters long according to a landscape plan done digitally. The tractor is equipped with sensors for site mapping and stone identification, and it uses specially adapted cameras and sensors and a machine vision algorithm to scan, perceive and weigh individual rocks. The algorithm determines the optimal position of each stone in the final structure, and then HEAP begins to place them in order, from the bottom up. It is also capable of laying 20-30 stones at once, as opposed to the limit of only one stone at a time when construction is done by humans.
The institute's staff, which operates as part of the digital production division of the National Network of Research Skills Centers, sees the potential for this idea to automate this building process. This is significant news, since dry stone walls are environmentally friendly thanks to the use of stones and remnants of existing old building materials (such as the ruins of Gaza buildings), without transporting huge amounts of material from place to place. In walls intended for an urban landscape, there is also no need for casting to reinforce the result – but it is quite possible that a similar method with the addition of casting will be used for the construction of buildings.
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