Applied Off-site and On-site Collective Multi-Robot Autonomous Building Manufacturing

建筑业在生产力、速度、人类安全、环境可持续性和质量方面明显落后于英国其他行业。除了英国的建筑供应和负担能力不足外，未来40年，随着全球人口的增长，建筑的人道主义需求和经济机会将大幅增加。然而，随着劳动力的老龄化和建筑被认为是最危险的工作环境之一，该行业需要探索全新的方法来应对这些迫在眉睫的挑战。虽然增加非现场制造提供了部分解决方案，但其方法不容易自动化。当单个大规模生产的部件可以通过将工人与危险机器分开的生产装配线有效地移动时，建筑制造涉及大规模定制或更大规模的一次性生产。这需要机械和人员四处移动，并可能在固定的制造工作（例如预制或现场房屋）内工作，因为各种独立和并行的任务在安全受损的重叠工作区中进行。为了解决这些问题，该项目从根本上研究了自动化的新运营和交付策略，以提供与机器人合作的新方式。共享施工环境的自动化要求机器人具有灵活的能力，并能适应可能发生的不可预测事件（室内或室外）。社会性昆虫，如白蚁，尽管它们的体积小，个体的限制，显示出集体工作的能力，以设计和建造大规模和复杂的结构;通过快速有效地组织自己，同时也提供灵活，可扩展的协调许多并行任务。受这种制造模式的启发，该项目将开发一种创新的多智能体控制框架，使分布式机器人团队能够以类似的方式操作，用于通过非现场制造，现场施工或使用现场工厂的混合解决方案进行的建筑物的制造和组装。这就需要增强现有的机器人，并开发新的避免碰撞和协作工作的能力。由于许多建筑任务需要专业设备，由不同机器人平台组成的异质团队，如敏捷的移动的地面车辆（UGV），飞行器（UAV），以及更大规模的工业机器人手臂，轨道和龙门系统，将能够合作，并共同承担超出每个单独机器人能力的任务，例如提升比任何一个机器人的有效载荷能力更重的物体。为了应对相关挑战，我们将整合增材制造、建筑和建筑组件规模制造的操作和组装能力，以及单个机器人做出本地决策的计算手段。最终的研究成果将是展示世界上第一个集体多机器人建筑制造系统，该系统可以自主建造立面或屋顶等部件，组装结构或建造自由形式的建筑展馆。我们还将把这些技术集成到原型建筑系统中，以创建一种新型的“主动”建筑，这种建筑可以使用多智能体系统来自我调节能源和收集数据，从而在设计、制造、施工和建筑使用之间提供一个封闭的运营生态，彻底改变我们制造、运营和使用建筑的方式。此外，将制定评估框架，以评估多机器人施工，并获得集体系统的客观措施，以提供更高的资源效率，质量，速度，安全性和正常运行时间与既定的施工方法相比。在此过程中，我们将建立新的指标，从经济和环境角度量化这些技术的影响。

Construction is significantly behind other UK sectors in productivity, speed, human safety, environmental sustainability and quality. In addition to inadequate building supply and affordability in the UK, humanitarian demand and economic opportunity for construction is set to increase substantially with global population growth over the next 40 years. However, with an aging work-force and construction considered to be one of the most dangerous working environments, the industry needs to explore radically new approaches to address these imminent challenges. While increased off-site manufacturing provides a partial solution, its methods are not easy to automate. Where individual mass-produced parts can be moved efficiently through production assembly lines that separate workers from dangerous machinery, building manufacturing involves mass-customisation or one-off production at a larger scale. This requires machinery and people to move around, and potentially work inside of a fixed manufacturing job e.g. a prefabricated or on-site house, as various independent and parallel tasks are undertaken in safety-compromised, overlapping work-zones. To address these issues, this project investigates fundamentally new operational and delivery strategy for automation to offer new ways of working with robots.Automation of shared construction environments requires robotic capabilities to be flexible and adaptive to unpredictable events that can occur (indoors or outdoors). Social insects such as termites, despite their small size and individual limitations, show an ability to work collectively to design and build structures of substantial scale and complexity; by quickly and efficiently organising themselves while also providing flexible, scalable coordination of many parallel tasks. Inspired by this model of manufacture, this project will develop an innovative multi-agent control framework that enables a distributed team of robots to operate in a similar way for the manufacture and assembly of buildings undertaken by off-site manufacture, on-site construction, or hybrid solutions using on-site factories. This requires the enhancement of existing robots, and development of new capabilities for collision avoidance and collaborative working. As many building tasks require specialist equipment, heterogenous teams comprised of different robot platforms such as agile mobile ground vehicles (UGVs), aerial vehicles (UAVs), alongside larger scale industrial robot arm, track and gantry systems, will be able to collaborate, and collectively undertake tasks beyond the capabilities of each individual robot such as lifting objects heavier than any one robot's payload capacity.To address construction relevant challenges, we will integrate capabilities for additive manufacturing, manipulation and assembly for building and building-component scale manufacture, in addition to computational means for individual robots to make local decisions. The final research deliverable will be the demonstration of the world's first collective multi-robot building manufacturing system that can autonomously build parts such as a façade or roof, assemble a structure, or construct a freeform building pavilion. We will also integrate these technologies within prototype building systems themselves, to create a new type of 'active' building that can use a multi-agent system to self-regulate energy and harvest data to provide a closed operational ecology between design, manufacturing, construction and building use, revolutionizing the way we manufacture, operate and use buildings. Further, evaluation frameworks will be developed to assess multi-robot construction and obtain objective measures for collective systems to deliver greater resource efficiency, quality, speed, safety and up-time compared with established construction methods. In doing so, we will establish new metrics quantifying the impact of these technologies from both economic and environmental perspectives.