Adaptive Robot Perception in Construction Environments using 4D BIM

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach that integrates 4D BIM schedule data into human activity recognition for construction robotics, enhancing prediction accuracy and safety in human-robot collaboration.

Contribution

It develops a pipeline that incorporates 4D BIM data to restrict activity prediction space, improving recognition robustness in construction environments.

Findings

Higher confidence predictions with BIM data integration

Improved activity recognition accuracy over baseline models

Enhanced safety and trust in human-robot collaboration

Abstract

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a pivotal component of robot perception for physical Human Robot Interaction (pHRI) tasks. In construction robotics, it is vital that robots have an accurate and robust perception of worker activities. This enhanced perception is the foundation of trustworthy and safe Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in an industrial setting. Many developed HAR algorithms lack the robustness and adaptability to ensure seamless HRC. Recent works have employed multi-modal approaches to increase feature considerations. This paper further expands previous research to include 4D building information modeling (BIM) schedule data. We created a pipeline that transforms high-level BIM schedule activities into a set of low-level tasks in real-time. The framework then utilizes this subset as a tool to restrict the solution space that the HAR algorithm can predict activities from. By limiting this subspace through 4D BIM schedule data, the algorithm has a higher chance of predicting the true possible activities from a smaller pool of possibilities in a localized setting as compared to calculating all global possibilities at every point. Results indicate that the proposed approach achieves higher confidence predictions over the base model without leveraging the BIM data.