Background and scope
Robotic automation offers significant advantages to several sectors, yet on-site construction robotics is amongst the most challenging and least understood fields in robotics. The unstructured, dynamic environment with human presence makes navigation and automation of the many concurrent construction tasks deeply challenging. Further, the current state-of-the-art solutions focus on adding higher degrees of automation to legacy tools, such as heavy equipment designed for diesel engines and human operators.
Radical innovations are essential for the sector to address the unprecedented wave of building growth, especially in the context of labour shortages, a productivity gap between the construction and other industries, rising expectations for occupational health and safety, and the need for healthier and more affordable living environments.
Through the collaboration of multiple agents (both humans and machines) construction processes can be accelerated, enabling more complex processes with multiple tasks to be performed simultaneously and collaboratively. Multi-robotic collaboration, where robotic agents support and complement each other's tasks and skill sets within the same workspace, may unlock entirely new processes that are not possible using single robotic machines. This approach could involve multiple distributed "swarms" of collaborative robots using distributed control algorithms and robot learning systems, which may be better suited to large,
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