Haptic interaction for human-robot shared perception in construction

The collaboration between robots and human agents has become a defining symbol of Industry 4.0. The construction industry has begun to utilize collaborative robots to extend workers' capability and facilitate complex construction operations in a more efficient and safe way. Robot teleoperation, i.e., human workers manipulating and/or commanding a remote robotic system at a distance, is particularly suited to converge the advantages of robotic systems and human agents in complex construction tasks, presenting a logical next step for moving to a fully automated construction industry. However, the human-robot interaction (HRI) design for construction teleoperation tasks is challenged by the complexity and variability of operational needs such as the evolving work environment, dynamic and unexpected workflows, motor-intensive manipulations, and hard-to-define human-robot collaboration requirements. Most existing HRI interfaces are mainly based on visual feedback (e.g., live streaming from a camera), which can hardly help restore the awareness and accurate perception of the remote workplace. The disconnection between the robotic perception and the human operator’s sensory processes creates a sensorimotor mismatch, affecting the teleoperation task performance and increasing training costs. This research aims to design and examine innovative haptic and force feedback for construction robot teleoperation that enriches the human operator’s perception of the remote robot workplaces. The physical interactions between the remote robotic system and the surrounding work environment, such as the resistance of rotating a valve, are captured, and modeled in a game engine, which are then manifested via various haptic simulators. With this proposed design, the machine perception of the remote workplaces in terms of work interface and spatial features can be transferred to the human operator in a more accurate and immersive way. To answer how these proposed haptic simulations help HRI in construction-specific scenarios, three studies were performed to design and test haptic interfaces for robot teleoperation in three typical construction tasks. The operational performance and associated cognitive and motor function changes were collected and analyzed via human subject experiments. The contribution of this c is expected to validate the task and human functional benefits of applying suitable haptic interfaces in context-realistic scenarios. The findings can also provide a practical design framework for conveying haptic information to the human operator for the future robot teleoperation for construction tasks.