The location of the YouTube film is not particularly spectacular.

10,000 square meters of gravel area in the west of Aachen, in the background the Lousberg, the imperial city's local mountain.

But what is then seen is impressive.

A rolling drilling machine trundles across the surface, stops in front of a concrete block, extends the drill and mills a precisely fitting hole.

A student is standing many meters away, typing on the laptop to explain to the machine what it has to do.

Nobody sweats, the students and their lecturers shed that before when they found out how it works at the "Center Construction Robotics" of the Aachen RWTH.

Ursula Kals

Editor in business, responsible for "Youth Writes".

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Sigrid Brell-Cokcan heads the institute and founded the chair for individualized construction production.

The 49-year-old professor is the initiator of the first reference construction site in Europe, which runs her institute together with an interdisciplinary team from the university and a European industrial consortium.

A real laboratory to test new construction processes and products, networked machines, the use of robots, software solutions under real conditions.

By accident to robotics

Recently there was a festival week with prominent politicians and sunshine.

This morning it's pouring rain on the test construction site, so retreat to the construction containers.

Originally, Sigrid Brell-Cokcan dealt with a completely different focus, namely the artistic aspects of architecture.

She studied in Vienna.

Her husband, with whom she has been with for 25 years, is also an architect and has an office in Istanbul.

Why did she become an architect?

"Architecture is something very tangible, the built environment affects people, whether they live or work." She came to robotics by chance 16 years ago, "like the virgin to the child", namely through an innovative project that deals with it dealt with which geometries can be represented with CNC technologies.

The acronym stands for Computerized Numerical Control and means machine tools that, through the use of control technology, are able to automatically produce workpieces with high precision, even for complex shapes.

Make work safer

When it comes to industrial robotics, alarm bells ring for many: Will more people be replaced by machines?

Brell-Cokcan contradicts routinely: It's not about less, but about other jobs, about inexpensive, safe and sustainable construction.

"We are researching better assistance systems, the machines should serve the people and know how to position themselves precisely, for example to be able to drill better." That makes work safer in an industry with a high accident rate, especially when dealing with large ones Machines such as construction cranes that move heavy loads.

"If the machine behaves incorrectly, you can detect this beforehand and stop it."

She is also concerned with the question of how a construction site can be designed more efficiently in order to save energy, material and resources.

"With the help of robotics, we can better identify process optimization." It's cheaper and more sustainable.

Another project focuses on controlled dismantling.

"Concrete doesn't go bad, it matures with age." One tries to save material from the landfill and to put it back into the construction cycle.

For example, it is about controlling a demolition machine in such a way that it cuts concrete blocks out of buildings in order to reuse them as a component.

This is called upcycling of material and not recycling, where concrete is shredded to use it for road substructure, for example.