HP SitePrint revolutionises construction

HP Inc. has announced HP SitePrint, a robotic solution that prints the most complex construction site layouts with pinpoint accuracy in a fraction of the time it takes manually - improving productivity by as much as ten times.

At $11.4 trillion, the construction sector represents 13 per cent of the world’s GDP and shows a steady growth of 3.5 per cent CAGR. Despite this, the industry faces challenges in productivity and human resourcing. While labour productivity in manufacturing has grown an average of 3.6 per cent a year over the past two decades, the construction sector has only seen a one per cent increase over the same time, according to McKinsey.

“Technology adoption and increased digitisation can help construction firms realise productivity gains,” said Daniel Martínez, VP and General Manager, HP Large Format Printing. “HP has played a key role in bridging digital and physical worlds with print solutions for architects and engineers over the last thirty years. With HP SitePrint, we’re making it faster and easier than ever for construction professionals to bring an idea to life on-site while also providing layout accuracy and reducing costs derived from reworks.”

Through over 80 pilot projects to date globally, HP SitePrint has been rigorously tested across multiple environments - including residential, parking, airport, and hospital projects. As part of the Early Access Program, HP SitePrint is available to customers in North America from September 2022. The final product and wider commercial launch are planned for 2023.

Performance and accuracy

HP SitePrint is an end-to-end, easy-to-use suite of technologies designed to automate the site layout process, consisting of:

• A rugged and autonomous robotic device designed to operate in the conditions of the construction site. Light and compact, it is very transportable, including a hard case that fits all the solution components
• Cloud tools to submit and prepare jobs to be printed, manage the fleet and track usage
• A touch screen tablet for remote control and configuration
• A portfolio of inks for different surfaces, environmental conditions, and durability requirements

“The existing manual layout process can be slow and labour intensive. Despite being done by specialists, there is always the risk of human error, which can result in costly reworks,” said Albert Zulps, Director of Emerging Technology at Skanska - a global construction and development company currently utilising HP SitePrint on two prominent US projects. “Layout experts are a scarce resource who add a lot of value in terms of planning and strategy but often end up dedicating most of their time to manual execution. HP SitePrint lets us do more with less, helping reduce schedules thanks to a much faster layout process and allowing senior operators to focus on other critical activities like quality control.”

The precise positioning and navigation of HP SitePrint on the job site are achieved by linking to a Robotic Total Station. The Robot Total Stations are provided by Leica Systems and Topcon.