Real-Time Guidance for Large-Scale Construction and Assembly Tasks

想象一下，你自愿帮助一家为低收入家庭建造负担得起的住房的非营利性公司建造房屋。到达施工现场后，你急切地想要提供帮助，但很快就发现，现场经理提供给你的说明超出了你的知识范围，你被要求使用的工具也不熟悉。当你挣扎着度过一天的时候，你的挫折感会积累起来，你会不断地向别人寻求指导和帮助，这也会分散他们对任务的注意力。你不禁会觉得，你的志愿者经历与其说是帮助，不如说是阻碍。但是，如果当你到达时，你已经收到了一块智能手表，它可以识别你的技能水平，自动为你分配适当的任务，并在你工作的同时提供循序渐进的指导。 这个例子展示了一个特定但重要的场景的学习和指导挑战。然而，在协调一致的集会努力中支持学习和指导的总体挑战适用于广泛的领域，如生境建设、住房改善、家具组装、救灾和难民避难所建设。我们专注于如何实现智能建筑和组装环境，在这种环境中，使用传感器和移动设备等计算技术来提供实时指导和协调，并适应工人的需求和环境变化。 为了实现这一未来，关键是要开发出识别员工技能水平的方法，监控他们在任务中的进度的技术，以及在移动和可穿戴设备上实时发送指令的界面。对计算机支持的协作工作的研究侧重于为虚拟领域中的远程协作实现有效的协调。通过这项工作，我们的目标是将这些概念扩展到物理领域，支持搭配协调。此外，软件学习方面的研究着眼于提供有效的教程，帮助用户在使用桌面软件时完成程序性任务。我们的工作将把这些发现推进到物理建造和组装任务中。 我们正在开发互动方法，让新手和专家工作人员通过使用多种形式的传感器和移动和可穿戴设备，有效地协调完成他们的任务。此外，我们正在开发系统和界面，以允许项目经理监控构建的进度，并根据员工的个人技能智能地分配子任务。我们还在研究低成本技术，这些技术可以在发展中地区提供这些负担，因为在这些地区，高效的栖息地建设至关重要。通过用数字技术和界面增强这种建筑和组装环境，所有技能和背景的人都将有能力参与、学习和取得成功。

Imagine that you have volunteered to help in the construction of a house for a non-profit company that builds affordable homes for low-income families. You arrive on the construction site eager to help, but quickly find that the instructions provided to you by the site manager go beyond your knowledge, and the tools you are asked to use are unfamiliar. As you struggle through the day your frustration builds, and you are constantly asking for guidance and assistance from others, distracting them from their tasks as well. You can't help but feel like your volunteer experience has been more of a hindrance than a help. But what if, when you had arrived, you had received a smartwatch, that recognized your skill level, automatically assigned you to appropriate tasks, and provided step-by-step instructions while you worked. This example demonstrates the learning and guidance challenges for one specific but important scenario. However, the overall challenge of supporting learning and guidance within coordinated assembly efforts applies to a broad range of domains, such as habitat construction, home improvement, furniture assembly, disaster relief, and refugee shelter construction. We focus on how to enable intelligent construction and assembly environments, where computational technologies, such as sensors and mobile devices, are used to provide guidance and coordination in real-time, and adapt to the worker's needs and environmental changes. To realize this future it will be critical to develop methods to recognize a worker's skill level, technologies to monitor their progress on a task, and interfaces to deliver instructions in real time on mobile and wearable devices. Research in computer-supported collaborative work has focused on enabling efficient coordination for remote collaboration in the virtual realm. With this work, we aim to extend these concepts into the physical realm, supporting collocated coordination. Furthermore, research in software learning has looked at providing effective tutorials for assisting with procedural tasks when using desktop software. Our work will advance such findings to physical construction and assembly tasks. We are developing interaction methods to allow novice and expert workers to coordinate efficiently to accomplish their tasks, using multiple forms of sensors and mobile and wearable devices. In addition, we are developing systems and interfaces to allow project managers to monitor the progress of a build, and intelligently distribute subtasks to workers based on their individual skills. We are also investigating low cost-technologies which can provide these affordances in developing regions, where efficient habitat construction is critical. By augmenting such construction and assembly environments with digital technologies and interfaces, people of all skills and backgrounds will be empowered to participate, learn and succeed.