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The adoption of robotics into the construction industry has been progressing slower than in the manufacturing and industrial sectors. Current shortfalls in skilled labor, productivity trends, and ongoing safety challenges point to the need for a drastic shift toward adopting robotics. Addressing these shortfalls would be a necessary component of the shift toward industrializing the construction industry. Despite this lag in technology adoption, the interest and development of robotic technology targeting the construction industry has grown in recent years and is ranging from the use of drones for tracking to advances in offsite fabrication. However, the integration into fundamental site construction necessitates reconsidering the information technology infrastructure needed to support detailed task execution information needs in the change from craft labor to robotic operations. This research presents the identification and mapping of the Information Technology (IT) system architecture required to support building information modeling (BIM) to robotic construction. Combining elements of BIM architecture and information exchanges with the needed construction task decomposition is required. These elements are mapped to the robotic system elements vital for mobile robotic operations. In addition to defining the functions and integration required to support the BIM to robotic Construction Workflow, shortcomings in existing infrastructure, notably regarding the ability to decompose construction fabrication and assembly means and methods, are defined.
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AutoGen-based AI assistant for improving the interactions between BIM and project teams for design coordination
In the construction industry, building information modeling (BIM) has been widely utilized in design coordination. However, this process is time-consuming to query the required element information and still requires the support of the BIM coordinator. Meanwhile, during diverse participants’ discussions, it is challenging to record knowledge and experiences residing in their minds and timely respond to them in the BIM model. GPT-based Large Language Models (LLMs) enable providing automatic solutions but lack accuracy and consistency, specifically for the construction domain. To bridge these gaps, we propose to develop an AI BIM coordinator by integrating basic construction knowledge and skillset into the current AutoGen model. It aims to alleviate high-skill requirements and specific functions of traditional BIM development while enhancing the interdisciplinary interpretability and performance of AI models. Specifically, we first identify the frequent and common interactions between BIM and project teams during the design coordination meetings. Correspondingly, we build the skillset that includes basic functions regarding building element semantic, geometric, and topological information. With this skillset, our designed workflow can interpret 3D BIM space and answer specific questions from users through flexible revisions and extensions. Beyond the text responses that describe relations among elements, the BIM tool can be automatically invoked to execute this task and the model can be directly built in the 3D environment for stakeholders’ discussions in the design coordination meetings. If failed, our designed checker agent will regenerate the code until execution is succeeded. As users continually communicate with the AI BIM coordinator and provide feedback, the assistant can collect and annotate these data for fine-tuning the current model to make it more adaptive to specific construction tasks. For validation, a prototype system is developed with building design coordination meeting data. The results demonstrate that our designed workflow has better performance in execution succeeded rate (84.62%) and accuracy (76.92%) despite consuming more time (1 min 12 secs – 3 mins 1 sec) than general agent workflow.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2222730
- PAR ID:
- 10626950
- Publisher / Repository:
- the 2024 International Conference on Human Factors in Design, Engineering, and Computing
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- 1829-1837
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The adoption of robotics into the construction industry has been much slower than in manufacturing and industrial sectors. Current shortfalls in skilled labor, productivity trends, and ongoing safety challenges point to the need for a drastic shift toward the adoption of robotics as a component of a shift toward industrialized construction. Despite this lag, the interest and development of robotic technology targeting construction has grown in recent years, ranging from the use of drones for tracking to use in offsite fabrication. However, the integration into fundamental site construction requires reconsideration of the information technology infrastructure needed to support detailed task execution information needs in the transition from craft labor to robotic operations. This research presents the identification and mapping of the IT System Architecture required to support BIM to Robotic Construction. Combining elements of the Building Information Modeling architecture and information exchanges with the needed construction task decomposition is required. These elements are mapped to the robotic system elements required for mobile robotic operations. In addition to defining the functions and integration required to support the BIM to Robotic Construction Workflow, shortcomings in existing infrastructure, notably regarding the ability to decompose construction fabrication and assembly means and methods are defined.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.54941/ahfe1005750
