Exploiting the Power of Human-Robot Collaboration: Coupling and Scale Effects in Bricklaying

TL;DR

This paper investigates how human-robot collaboration impacts construction productivity in bricklaying, revealing that increasing team size enhances efficiency even without changing the human-robot ratio, through agent-based simulation.

Contribution

It introduces an agent-based modeling approach to analyze coupling and scale effects in human-robot collaboration during bricklaying, highlighting the interdependence and productivity impacts.

Findings

HRC agents are interdependent due to human factors and collaboration behaviors.

Different HRC parameters significantly affect construction productivity.

Increasing the number of human-robot teams boosts productivity regardless of ratio.

Abstract

As an important contributor to GDP growth, the construction industry is suffering from labor shortage due to population ageing, COVID-19 pandemic, and harsh environments. Considering the complexity and dynamics of construction environment, it is still challenging to develop fully automated robots. For a long time in the future, workers and robots will coexist and collaborate with each other to build or maintain a facility efficiently. As an emerging field, human-robot collaboration (HRC) still faces various open problems. To this end, this pioneer research introduces an agent-based modeling approach to investigate the coupling effect and scale effect of HRC in the bricklaying process. With multiple experiments based on simulation, the dynamic and complex nature of HRC is illustrated in two folds: 1) agents in HRC are interdependent due to human factors of workers, features of robots, and their collaboration behaviors; 2) different parameters of HRC are correlated and have significant impacts on construction productivity (CP). Accidentally and interestingly, it is discovered that HRC has a scale effect on CP, which means increasing the number of collaborated human-robot teams will lead to higher CP even if the human-robot ratio keeps unchanged. Overall, it is argued that more investigations in HRC are needed for efficient construction, occupational safety, etc.; and this research can be taken as a stepstone for developing and evaluating new robots, optimizing HRC processes, and even training future industrial workers in the construction industry.