ICRA 2023

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.