CoCoRo
Collaborative Construction Robots
Principal Investigators
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Johannes Fottner
Chair of Material Handling, Material Flow and Logistics, TUM School of Engineering and Design
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alois Christian Knoll
Chair of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Real-time Systems, TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology
Project summary
Today's construction sites are maintained mainly by large, manually operated machinery and human workers. Many tasks are monotonous and have dangerous or harmful components for humans. Together with the current severe housing shortage, exploding costs and a constant shortage of skilled workers, the construction industry urgently needs to change.
Automated processes and machines have transformed production halls in the past decades. Automating machinery on construction sites, however, is considerably more difficult than in an enclosed industrial environment. In such an environment, tasks performed by autonomous machines are commonly isolated from human workspaces and these environments might even be augmented with visual aids. These measures for integrating automated machines in a work process are non-trivial to implement on a constantly changing construction site. This project therefore aims to investigate the steps necessary for transforming the construction site of the near future into a more automated and intelligent workplace. This does not only require the building of autonomously controllable machinery (fml) or the generation of digital twins within the construction site (AIR). This challenging task requires an intermediate step - a collaborative construction site. Since today's construction sites are highly unstructured and not as deterministic as a factory hall, it is crucial for a machine to not only perceive its environment but also interact with it, especially with the human workers. We see this as a necessary intermediate step between today´s manual labor and full autonomy on construction sites in the future. We will use the process of material accumulation and compaction, which requires multiple specialized machines, as a prime example for investigating this transformation. This will include the autonomous operation of individual machines, their interaction with each other as well as with human workers. Other processes can be transformed in the same way. The outcomes of this research will form the basis for the transformation of future construction sites. Our vision of the transformation of a manual construction process via collaborative construction to a robotic process is shown in the graphical abstract on the title page for the process of soil absorption, distribution, and compaction.