Autodesk Opens Robotics Construction Lab at University of Florida

Autodesk and the University of Florida opened the Autodesk Design and Make Laboratory in Gainesville with a $1 million Autodesk donation for equipment, renovations, and technical support, announced in a press release.

The lab opens to students this fall semester and will house Dr. Aladdin Alwisy's Smart Industrialized Design and Construction Lab across UF's College of Design, Construction and Planning and Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.

The lab is focused on industrialized construction, including collaborative robots that frame walls and assemble panels, digital twins, Building Information Modeling, and modular building methods. Early testing by the lab research team showed robots could frame a set of houses in a weekend instead of months.

The lab will support UF's Industrialized Construction Engineering degree program, which welcomes its first cohort this fall. Autodesk previously invested $1.5 million in 2024 to help launch the program.

Graduate researcher Frank Xie is building a computer vision system with digital twins modeled in Autodesk Fusion so robots can read a construction design and translate it into assembly steps. Dr. Alwisy expects the lab's technology to move toward field deployment over the next several years.