CoBuilt Towards a novel methodology for workflow capture and analysis of carpentry tasks for human-robot collaboration
Dagmar Ingrid Elfriede Reinhardt, Hank M. Haeusler, Lian Loke, Eduardo De Oliveira Barata, Charlotte Firth, Nariddh Khean, Kerry Anne London, Yingbin Feng, Rodney Watt · 2019
Advanced manufacturing and robotic fabrication for the housing construction industry is mainly focused on the use of industrial robots in the pre-fabrication stage.Yet to be fully developed is the use on-site of collaborative robots, able to work cooperatively with humans in a range of construction trades.Our study focuses on the trade of carpentry in small-to-medium size enterprises in the Australian construction industry, seeking to understand and identify opportunities in the current workflows of carpenters for the role of collaborative robots.Prior to presenting solutions for this problem, we first developed a novel methodology for the capture and analysis of the body movements of carpenters, resulting in a suite of visual resources to aid us in thinking through where, what, and how a collaborative robot could participate in the carpentry task.We report on the challenges involved, and outline how the results of applying this methodology will inform the next stage of our research.