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As a proactive means of preventing struck-by accidents in construction, many studies have presented proximity monitoring applications using wireless sensors (e.g., RFID, UWB, and GPS) or computer vision methods. Most prior research has emphasized proximity detection rather than prediction. However, prediction can be more effective and important for contact-driven accident prevention, particularly given that the sooner workers (e.g., equipment operators and workers on foot) are informed of their proximity to each other, the more likely they are to avoid the impending collision. In earlier studies, the authors presented a trajectory prediction method leveraging a deep neural network to examine the feasibility of proximity prediction in real-world applications. In this study, we enhance the existing trajectory prediction accuracy. Specifically, we improve the trajectory prediction model by tuning its pre-trained weight parameters with construction data. Moreover, inherent movement-driven post-processing algorithm is developed to refine the trajectory prediction of a target in accordance with its inherent movement patterns such as the final position, predominant direction, and average velocity. In a test on real-site operations data, the proposed approach demonstrates the improvement in accuracy: for 5.28 seconds’ prediction, it achieves 0.39 meter average displacement error, improved by 51.43% as compared with the previous one (0.84 meters). The improved trajectory prediction method can support to predict potential contact-driven hazards in advance, which can allow for prompt feedback (e.g., visible, acoustic, and vibration alarms) to equipment operators and workers on foot. The proactive intervention can lead the workers to take prompt evasive action, thereby reducing the chance of an impending collision. 

Construction robots have drawn increased attention as a potential means of improving construction safety and productivity. However, it is still challenging to ensure safe human-robot collaboration on dynamic and unstructured construction workspaces. On construction sites, multiple entities dynamically collaborate with each other and the situational context between them evolves continually. Construction robots must therefore be equipped to visually understand the scene’s contexts (i.e., semantic relations to surrounding entities), thereby safely collaborating with humans, as a human vision system does. Toward this end, this study builds a unique deep neural network architecture and develops a construction-specialized model by experimenting multiple fine-tuning scenarios. Also, this study evaluates its performance on real construction operations data in order to examine its potential toward real-world applications. The results showed the promising performance of the tuned model: the recall@5 on training and validation dataset reached 92% and 67%, respectively. The proposed method, which supports construction co-robots with the holistic scene understanding, is expected to contribute to promoting safer human-robot collaboration in construction.