Digital Timber Construction

Due to its numerous advantages, Digital Timber Construction is becoming an increasingly important key technology for the construction industry. It is a sustainable, lightweight, and flexible building material with an excellent strength-to-weight ratio and low energy requirements during processing.

A major challenge in the construction industry—and particularly in timber construction—is the low level of automation and digitization compared to other industrial sectors that rely on mass production. Construction projects are highly customized and are carried out by a multitude of small, collaborating teams and contractors. 

At the TTZ Aichach, innovative digital planning tools and process optimizations are being developed in the field of Digital Timber Construction through close collaboration between researchers and interested companies from the construction industry and the skilled trades.

At the TTZ Aichach, timber structures are no longer built using long, uniformly grown logs—such as spruce. Instead, taking the challenges of climate change into account, AI-based design tools and robots are being programmed to construct—using naturally grown short pieces of wood of varying lengths, including chestnut wood — to construct walls and, in particular, large-span hall structures that do not require screws. 

The researchers and collaboration partners at TTZ Aichach, working together with methods of digital timber construction, demonstrate how small pieces of wood can be used to achieve high material utilization and how skilled workers can be precisely supported through the use of robots in time- and labor-intensive work steps—such as sawing, milling, gripping, and repositioning—can be precisely supported.