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Imagine *** world where you can fold up your home like origami and take it to go skip the traffic by soaring to the skies and 3D print bridges. These innovations are actually closer to reality than you'd think. We spoke to civil engineers in the midst of developing groundbreaking technologies to improve our crumbling infrastructure. What do these experts envision for our future? Let's take *** look. Infrastructure is something that everyone uses every day, and even if you can't see it, it's critical to everything that you're able to do in your daily life. America's infrastructure is at *** critical crossroads. As civil engineers design our future, they're tackling *** number of issues aging infrastructure, climate change, and increased urbanization in areas prone to extreme events like earthquakes, wildfires, and flooding. We've seen with climate change that different structures are facing different loadings than they were initially designed for originally and as *** result, they need to be either redesigned or rethought of in terms of how they can be more durable. This is Jason McCormick. He's *** professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan. So I've been involved with research looking at innovative approaches to limiting damage to structures as *** result of seismic events and extreme loading events. McCormick has been. Testing new materials like polymer and metal foams. They're fairly lightweight, but they can do things like maybe inhibit local buckling for *** particular steel member or be used in *** floor system to reduce the weight of that floor system while still providing the rigidity and safety that's needed under, say, an extreme loading event. Onto the emerging tech side, 3D printing can be used to build structures like houses. In 2021, *** Dutch robotics company called MC3D built *** 12 m 3D printed stainless steel bridge in Amsterdam, but experts say 3D printing technology is not quite there yet to mass produce large scale structures. It's going to be very useful in creating kind of innovative one-off solutions or repairing, say something that's been damaged that was designed 50 years ago and there's no longer *** mold to cast it in iron or something along those lines. Engineers at the University of Michigan are also working on ways robots can help with construction. So some things that are being looked at is so heavy lifts, *** repetitive motions of bringing the materials to the right location so that humans don't have to kinda go between different locations, it saves on kind of wear and tear on the body. I think that's only going to improve construction efficiency, uh, lower costs and make construction safer so that we can build more buildings more quickly to accommodate the needs that society has. Over at Georgia Tech, civil engineering professor Iris Tien is in the middle of developing sensors that can closely monitor and fix issues in different infrastructures like the water or electrical power system. This way, the monitors can instantly identify issues and could even solve it almost instantly instead of waiting for *** service worker. They've been able to successfully implement these sensors right in Georgia. Georgia Power is our main utility provider for electrical power, and they have implemented this across their network and they've actually seen quantifiable evidence and performance that it reduces outage times for customers and it increases performance of the system. Now, let's fast forward *** few 50 to 100 years. What do civil engineers think life will look like? David Oay has been doing just that. O'Day is *** senior vice president and the national director of structural engineering for the American sector of WSP, one of the world's leading consulting engineering firms. He worked with the American Society of Civil Engineers to create *** film that imagines an innovative future. The cities of the future movie is not science fiction. Even though it imagines *** future that is not predicting exactly what will happen or exactly what *** city will look like. It's based on real technologies and research that we're doing today. We imagined *** new aerial highway system where vehicles would fly around and deliver you your lunch or perhaps take you from place to place in *** very dense urban city without going through traffic and creating pollution in the environment, buildings with new types of facades that are more efficient and can adapt to the climate. Or even generate their own energy. Oday's team also imagined buildings that integrate smart technology. The use of sensors and the technology of sensors to sense where you are in *** space is advancing to the point where you don't need to have *** thermostat. Sensors can determine the amount of heat that's needed for comfort, um, the amount of heat that's being generated in any portion of the building so that we can optimize where the heat is going. Also security and getting into and out of spaces safely, uh, with everyone carrying smartphones and having identity information on them is being revolutionized to make the flow of people and logistics much more efficient. Keep in mind is that we're always trying to innovate, we're always trying to improve things for society as *** whole. TN is part of *** new initiative called the Lifeline Advisory Panel out of the National Institute of Building Sciences based in DC. We have several initiatives that we're doing. Some of the the key ones are kind of motivating or incentivizing, increased investment in infrastructure, more strategic investment in infrastructure, and seeing how governmental policies can work together with infrastructure owners and operators. As America's infrastructure continues to age, investing in these innovations is important now more than ever. The. Evolution of technology is accelerating at an exponential rate, meaning it's increasing. It's accelerating every year. We need to keep up with it. We can't be left behind, because if we are, we'll be left with an infrastructure that's insufficient and could be very dangerous. So as civil engineers, we're working very hard to stay ahead of it. I'm excited to see where it's going to go next.