The University of Toronto's Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering (CivMin) has commissioned its first industrial-scale robotic fabrication system for mass timber construction, deploying a KUKA Quantec KR210 robotic arm capable of milling timber components to 0.06-millimetre pose repeatability - a threshold previously reserved for metalworking and advanced manufacturing environments.
Background
The installation occupies the Machine Shop of the Galbraith Building on the university's St. George campus. It is the culmination of a three-year procurement, design, and approvals programme overseen by Professor Aryan Rezaei Rad, who leads CivMin's Sustainable Structural Systems (SuStrucSy) research laboratory. According to Wood Central, the platform ranks among the largest robotic arms ever installed at a Canadian university.
The deployment follows successive iterations of CivMin's "Robot Made" design-build programme, a cross-faculty collaboration with the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty of Architecture that has progressively tested robotic timber assembly at full scale. The 2025 Robot Made pavilion - fabricated using reciprocal structural systems in which each member simultaneously supports and is supported by its neighbours - was displayed at the front of the Galbraith Building and served as a public proof-of-concept for the industrial capacity now housed in the Machine Shop. As one graduate student involved in the 2025 programme noted, the ability to robotically manufacture members, pre-drill holes, and cut complex geometries "for complex reciprocal structures" demonstrated a new threshold for automated timber work.
System Details
The KUKA Quantec KR210 delivers a 3.5-metre reach with tool attachment, a 210-kilogram rated payload, and a 15-kilowatt milling spindle, according to Wood Central's reporting on the installation. The cell includes dual integrated robotic and fabrication controllers alongside a precision workholding table, enabling the arm to sculpt solid timber blocks in three dimensions and carve interlocking shapes from sheet stock without fastener-based connections.
Toolpaths are generated parametrically through Grasshopper and Rhino workflows, allowing design teams to move from computational structural models directly to shop-ready fabrication instructions. According to the MDPI journal Buildings, between 2020 and 2025, industrial articulated arms accounted for an average of 82.4% of robotic timber construction research literature, reflecting the field's established reliance on fixed, factory-based platforms of this type.
Professor Rezaei Rad's graduate and undergraduate research students are training on the system to translate computational mass timber designs into fabricated, full-scale building components - positioning CivMin's Machine Shop as a bridge between academic research and industrial-scale offsite prefabrication workflows.
Regulatory Outlook
The installation coincides with a rapidly evolving Canadian building code environment for mass timber. Ontario's updated Building Code provisions, which came into force on January 1, 2025, expanded Encapsulated Mass Timber Construction (EMTC) allowances to buildings up to 18 storeys, up from the previous 12-storey ceiling. British Columbia implemented equivalent 18-storey EMTC provisions in 2024, and the Canadian Board for Harmonized Construction Codes released the 2025 National Model Codes in December 2025 as a framework for national harmonization.
Despite this regulatory momentum, a C.D. Howe Institute report cited by Construction Connect Canada found that "Canada has moved slowly, with fragmented standards and limited incentives for adoption" compared to Scandinavian markets where prefabricated mass timber construction is well established. The federal government's $13-billion Build Canada Homes initiative, which explicitly targets factory-built, modular, and mass timber methods, has been positioned as a mechanism to close that gap. However, the same report cautioned that without harmonized permitting and streamlined building code interpretation across municipalities, productivity gains will remain limited.
For the offsite fabrication sector, the CivMin installation signals that high-precision robotic milling - long a staple of steel and aluminum component manufacturing - is migrating into structural timber workflows at a scale relevant to commercial construction supply chains.
