CAREER: Robust and Collaborative Perception and Navigation for Construction Robots

建筑业负责维护老化的民用基础设施，并建造能够适应21世纪社会需求的新设施。这是对解决职业安全、劳动生产率、成本和劳动力短缺等长期存在的问题的持续迫切需求的补充。一个有前途的技术解决方案是在建筑工地上引入移动的机器人。利用机器人和人工智能（AI）的最新发现来应对上述挑战是可能的。然而，与制造自动化或自动驾驶汽车不同，由于需要在动态环境中导航，建筑机器人面临着独特的挑战。这种机器人还需要在各种任务中与人类密切合作，并且经常处理重型有效载荷。该奖项支持基础机器人技术研究，以便为建筑工地监控机器人提供更好的感知和导航。它将生产一个配备摄像头的智能移动的机器人团队，以自主监控施工进度和操作，以提高工地效率和安全性。这项研究的结果将广泛适用于建筑以外的场景，从联网和自动驾驶汽车到智能和无障碍城市中的服务机器人。该项目将促进机器人、人工智能、土木和机械工程之间的合作。此外，它旨在通过教育游戏、多学科机器人课程和劳动力培训讲习班，扩大代表性不足的群体在工程领域的参与。建筑工地中的移动的机器人往往受到遮挡和视野有限造成的感知挑战的限制。在动态工作现场，有限的感知导致导航和低效的援助。为了提高移动的机器人视觉系统的鲁棒性、可靠性和可扩展性，将使用新型的自监督和基于图的表示学习来从高维感官输入中提取、组织和推理地点和对象。这项研究将沿着沿着三个方向推进最先进的技术水平：（1）从拓扑表示的鲁棒导航，用于在动态和不断变化的作业现场进行监控，（2）协作感知，用于在忙碌的作业现场提供更安全的操作监控和碰撞警告，以及（3）在算法，系统和数据集级别上集成感知和导航。该研究将通过行业合作伙伴在真实的建筑工地进行验证，最终的软件、硬件设计和数据集将是开源的，以促进未来的研究。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The construction industry is responsible for maintaining aging civil infrastructure and build new facilities that can accommodate the social needs of the 21st century. This is in addition to the ongoing critical need to address long-standing problems in occupational safety, labor productivity, costs, and labor shortage. A promising technical solution is to introduce mobile robots on construction jobsites. It is possible to leverage recent discoveries in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle those aforementioned challenges. However, unlike manufacturing automation or self-driving cars, construction robots face unique challenges due to the need to navigate dynamic environments. Such robots are also required to work closely with humans in a variaty of tasks and often handle heavy payloads. This award supports fundamental robotics research to allow better perception and navigation for construction jobsite monitoring robots. It will produce an intelligent mobile robot team equipped with cameras to autonomously monitor construction progress and operations to improve jobsite efficiency and safety. The results of this research will be widely applicable to scenarios beyond construction, ranging from connected and autonomous vehicles to service robotics in smart and accessible cities. The project will facilitate collaboration between robotics, artificial intelligence, and civil and mechanical engineering. Furthermore, it aims to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in engineering via educational games, multi-disciplinary robotics curriculum, and workforce training workshops.Mobile robotics in construction jobsites are often limited by perception challenges due to occlusion and limited field of view. In dynamic jobsites, limited perception leads to navigation and inefficient assistance. To improve the robustness, reliability, and scalability of the vision system in mobile robots, novel self-supervised and graph-based representation learning will be used to extract, organize, and reason about places and objects from high-dimensional sensory inputs. This research will advance the state of the art along three directions: (1) robust navigation from topological representations for monitoring in dynamic and ever-changing jobsites, (2) collaborative perception for providing safer operation monitoring and collision warnings on busy jobsites, and (3) integrated perception and navigation at both the algorithm, system, and dataset levels. The research will be validated in real construction jobsites through industry partners, and the resulting software, hardware design, and dataset will be open source to stimulate future research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.