New AR Carpentry System Eliminates The Need For Pencils And Tape Measures

Factory robots may dominate with speed and precision, but they come at a high cost and often at the expense of skilled human labor. Now, a breakthrough from Switzerland’s EPFL University offers a balanced alternative: a system called Augmented Carpentry, which uses augmented reality (AR) to guide human carpenters with robot-like accuracy, all without replacing them.

Created by Andrea Settimi and colleagues, the open-source platform runs primarily on a tablet that mounts directly onto a power tool such as a saw. This mobile design lets the tablet travel from tool to tool, staying relevant at every step of the build.

Carpenters begin by scanning each piece of wood using the tablet’s built-in camera, which feeds data into the system. Next, they apply adhesive-backed marker strips to the wood. These allow the system to track each piece in 3D space, identifying orientation and dimensions with extreme precision.

After uploading their digital blueprints, users can view the wood on the tablet screen where precise, color-coded cutting guides appear, detailing the exact length, depth, and angle for every cut.

These visual cues are accurate to within fractions of a millimeter, and they stay perfectly aligned regardless of the user’s movement or shifting camera angles. Most notably, carpenters don’t need to measure or mark anything manually.

The system cleverly addresses the inaccessibility of robotic woodwork systems by offering many of the same advantages without displacing skilled workers. It also solves a key technical challenge: the ability to filter out workshop clutter through refined computer vision algorithms, ensuring that only the relevant wood pieces are analyzed and tracked.

This empowers small construction firms to compete with larger operations—not by automating people out of the process, but by enhancing human craftsmanship with digital tools.

Settimi emphasized: “By leveraging the potential of human-machine collaboration for modern carpentry and the design of timber structures, Augmented Carpentry can ensure human operators remain involved in the process, thus promoting construction methods that are digitally assisted, local and socially responsible.”