RoBétArmé Project: Human-robot collaborative construction system for shotcrete digitization and automation through advanced perception, cognition, mobility and additive manufacturing skills.

The importance of construction automation has grown worldwide, aiming to deliver new machineries for the automation of roads, tunnels, bridges, buildings and earth-work construction. This need is mainly driven by (i) the shortage and rising costs of skilled workers, (ii) the tremendous increased needs for new infrastructures to serve the daily activities and (iii) the immense demand for maintenance of ageing infrastructure. Shotcrete (sprayed concrete) is increasingly becoming popular technology among contractors and builders, as its application is extremely economical and flexible as the growth in construction repairs in developed countries demand excessive automation of concrete placement. Even if shotcrete technology is heavily mechanized, the actual application is still performed manually at a large extend. RoBétArméEuropean project targets the Construction 4.0 transformation of the construction with shotcrete with the adoption of breakthrough technologies such as sensors, augmented reality systems, high-performance computing, additive manufacturing, advanced materials, autonomous robots and simulation systems, technologies that have already been studied and applied so far in Industry 4.0. The paper at hand showcases the development of a novel robotic system with advanced perception, cognition and digitization capabilities for the automation of all phases of shotcrete application. In particular, the challenges and barriers in shotcrete automation are presented and the RoBétArmésuggested solutions are outlined. We introduce a basic conceptual architecture of the system to be developed and we demonstrate the four application scenarios on which the system is designated to operate.

The RoBétArmé European project targets the Construction 4.0 transformation of the construction with shotcrete with the adoption of breakthrough technologies such as sensors, augmented reality systems, high-performance computing, additive manufacturing, advanced materials, autonomous robots and simulation systems, technologies that have already been studied and applied so far in Industry 4.0. This paper showcases a case study on which novel robotic systems will be developed for the automation of shotecrete application. The outcomes of this research can be widely used in other application technologies related to the construction domain.

Efficient human 3D localization and free space segmentation for human-aware mobile robots in warehouse facilities.

Real-time prediction of human location combined with the capability to perceive obstacles is crucial for socially-aware navigation in robotics. Our work focuses on localizing humans in the world and predicting the free space around them by incorporating other static and dynamic obstacles. We propose a multi-task learning strategy to handle both tasks, achieving this goal with minimal computational demands. We use a dataset captured in a typical warehouse environment by mounting a perception module consisting of a Jetson Xavier AGX and an Intel L515 LiDAR camera on a MiR100 mobile robot. Our method, which is built upon prior works in the field of human detection and localization demonstrates improved results in difficult cases that are not tackled in other works, such as human instances at a close distance or at the limits of the field of view of the capturing sensor. We further extend this work by using a lightweight network structure and integrating a free space segmentation branch that can independently segment the floor space without any prior maps or 3D data, relying instead on the characteristics of the floor. In conclusion, our method presents a lightweight and efficient solution for predicting human 3D location and segmenting the floor space for low-energy consumption platforms, tested in an industrial environment.