Human-Robot Collaboration in Construction: Opportunities and Challenges

The last decade of robotic advances in manipulation, sensing, and computing is starting to enable the use of robots in unstructured environments, such as construction, to assist in hazardous, repetitive, and strenuous manual tasks. The construction field poses considerable technical challenges that have led to complex setups and programming as well as unsafe robots that are not suited for human-robot collaboration. Human-robot collaboration through haptic interfaces, utilized in other fields, could help integrate the workers' expertise with the robots' accuracy, safety, repeatability, and speed, but have not yet been widely applied to the construction industry. By using the SAI robotic simulation environment and human-safe compliant robots, this paper introduces a method to study the potential of haptics for five construction tasks: drywall installation, painting, bolting, welding, and pouring concrete.