Regular inspection and monitoring of buildings and infrastructure, that is collectively called the built environment in this paper, is critical. The built environment includes commercial and residential buildings, roads, bridges, tunnels, and pipelines. Automation and robotics can aid in reducing errors and increasing the efficiency of inspection tasks. As a result, robotic inspection and monitoring of the built environment has become a significant research topic in recent years. This review paper presents an in-depth qualitative content analysis of 269 papers on the use of robots for the inspection and monitoring of buildings and infrastructure. The review found nine different types of robotic systems, with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) being the most common, followed by unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). The study also found five different applications of robots in inspection and monitoring, namely, maintenance inspection, construction quality inspection, construction progress monitoring, as-built modeling, and safety inspection. Common research areas investigated by researchers include autonomous navigation, knowledge extraction, motion control systems, sensing, multi-robot collaboration, safety implications, and data transmission. The findings of this study provide insight into the recent research and developments in the field of robotic inspection and monitoring of the built environment and will benefit researchers, and construction and facility managers, in developing and implementing new robotic solutions.
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Web Perspectives in Robotics Applications: Commonsense Knowledge, Autonomous Vehicles and Human-Robot Collaboration
The realms of commonsense knowledge and reasoning, vehicle automation with full as well as partial autonomy, and human-robot collaboration, present growing areas of research in recent times, with much of the concerned data being disseminated through the Web and devices encompassing IoT (Internet of Things); the data per se being heterogeneous including plain text, images, audiovisuals, hypertext and hypermedia. Due to the advent of autonomous vehicles, there is a greater need for the embodiment of commonsense knowledge within their development in order to simulate subtle, intuitive aspects of human judgment. The field of robotics has often encountered collaborative tasks between humans and robots to enhance the respective activities involved and produce better results than humans or robots would achieve working by themselves. Accordingly, this article outlines and organizes some of the research occurring in these areas along with its Web perspectives and applications. Context related to human-robot collaboration and commonsense knowledge appears via a survey of the literature. Vehicle automation is significant with the relevant studies: its definition and methods of improvement are of focus in the article. Some work in this area makes an impact on smart manufacturing. There is discussion on how human-robot collaboration is beneficial, and how commonsense knowledge is useful for the collaboration to occur in an enhanced manner. This article would be potentially interesting to various communities, e.g. AI professionals, Web developers, robotics engineers, and data scientists.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2117308
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10451714
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM SIGWEB Newsletter
- Volume:
- 2023
- Issue:
- Winter
- ISSN:
- 1931-1745
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 22
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3583849.3583853
