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ICRA 2023

Configurable Collaborative Robot Technologies in Construction

Date: May 29, 2023
Location: ICC Capital Suite 3
ExCeL London, Royal Victoria Dock, 1 Western Gateway, London E16 1XL

Organizers

Nikos Tsagarakis

Main Organizer

Humanoids and Human Centered Mechatronics
Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia.

Via S. Quirico, 19d - 16163 Genoa, Italy

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Tel: +39 010 2898 296

Andrea Giusti

Co-Organizer

Robotics and Intelligent Systems Engineering
Fraunhofer Italia Research

Via A. Volta 13a - 39100 Bolzano, Italy

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Tel: +39 340 4250 699

Objective

While construction processes can rely on many apparatuses to enhance productivity, reduce physical load, and improve the safety of personnel, still many manual duties and tasks remain for construction workers. Construction processes suffer from high risk and hazardous tasks, which lead every year to the highest number of fatal accidents among all sectors in Europe. Properly conceived robotic systems for construction can reduce the physical load of works, or for tasks imposing hazards and risks to the operators, enhance the health and safety, and compensate, at the same time, the shortage of workers in the construction industry. However, classical robotic systems have provided limited solutions in building construction due to the highly unstructured environments and poor adaptability to the frequently changing tasks and environment conditions. This workshop targets to discuss the most recent developments in configurable collaborative robotic systems and technologies that attempt to address the high level challenges of the unstructured construction environments enabling the use of robotics in this high potential application domain. In overall, the workshop aims at:

  • establishing liaisons, bringing together researchers in the field of configurable and collaborative robot technologies ranging from mechatronic design to high level application control, passing through robot motion control, planning and perception, with potential applications in construction, for presenting current results and discussing challenges, towards a boosted action for contributing to unleash to applicability of advanced robotic systems in construction;
  • offering an interactive session on open challenges of construction scenarios for robotics;
  • presenting the opportunity to junior researchers and doctoral candidates to interact with researchers of higher seniority in view of construction robotics applications;
  • introducing the possibility also to researchers working on configurable or collaborative robot technologies not directly related to construction (e.g., focusing on applications in manufacturing) to understand how their concepts and results could support the application of robotics in construction.

Content

Novel technologies based on highly configurable and collaborative robotic platforms endowed with user-friendly programming tools and flexible and human-centric interfaces are emerging robotic technologies that have the potential to be more effective than existing solution in addressing the challenges of unstructured and diverse tasks that are present in the construction sites, unleashing the potential application of robots in the construction industry. This workshop will therefore facilitate to spread the knowledge and insights on such modern robot technologies that can be explored to meet the demands for adaptability to different tasks and environments, easy reconfiguration and maintenance, user-friendly programming and operation, and for being powerful but safe for human-robot coexistence and physical collaboration. At the same time, the particular target of this workshop on the application of robotics technologies in the construction industry significantly diversifies the content of the ICRA workshops, by dealing with an application area that has not yet being significantly explored by robotics or fully covered in other workshops in the past, despite being widely recognized as a highly promising domain.   The workshop will consist of a mixture of presentations divided into several relevant topics, considering the realization of robotics technologies developed to explore promising applications scenarios in the construction industry, including:

  1. Robotics technologies and products applied in construction.
  2. Use cases for robotics in building construction and management.
  3. Configurable mobile manipulation systems.
  4. End-effector tools for high payload physical interaction tasks.
  5. Hardware agnostic control frameworks for configurable robots
  6. Building-Information-Modelling based robot programming.
  7. Perception systems and scene awareness.
  8. Interaction control and interfaces for construction robots.
  9. Safe human robot co-existence and physical interaction with construction robots and machines.

Speakers

In the following table we report the list of speakers, along with their affiliation and the tentative title of their talks. All speakers have confirmed their participation to the workshop.

Workshop Schedule

Support for IEEE RAS Technical Committees

This workshop has received letters of support by the following IEEE/RAS Technical Committees
  • IEEE/RAS Technical Committee on Human-Robot Interaction & Coordination
  • IEEE/RAS Technical Committee on Collaborative Automation for Flexible Manufacturing;
  • IEEE/RAS Technical Committee on Smart Buildings

In addition, it is supported by the EC Project CONCERT under grant agreement No 101016007.