Development of Robotics & Automation Roadmap for Road Construction/Maintenance Projects

Over the past few decades, there have been no significant improvements in the construction industry's productivity. Outside the construction industry, robots have proven to be beneficial in improving productivity, safety, and quality. There is a growing interest in adopting robots in the construction industry to address these issues. As robots get introduced to the project sites, human-robot interaction becomes an important consideration for wide-scale adoption. The success of deploying robots in the construction industry depends on how well humans collaborate with the robots. This project focused on investigating the perception of various construction industry stakeholders in adopting robots in their projects, and the level of control they feel can be delegated to robots. This project also investigated major factors that impact the decision to use a robot for a particular task. The research used a survey to collect relevant data from various construction industry stakeholders for 11 specific types of robots that were applicable to the construction industry. The main findings from this study are that there was a generally positive perception of different types of robots regarding their job relevance, ease of use, output quality, and usefulness. Furthermore, from a human-robot collaboration perspective, majority of respondents supported shared autonomy between human and robot in different scenarios. This highlights the need for developing more robots that share control with the human when executing construction tasks.