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In the past, the construction industry has been slow to adopt new technology. There has been a rapid expansion of technologies, often referred to as Industry 4.0, to aid in the use of automation. One challenge paralleling these new technologies is implementing how a robot interprets design information, specifically information from a Building Information Model (BIM). This paper presents a method for identifying and transforming information from BIM to support robotic material placement on the construction site. This research will include a review of what information can be directly extracted from the model and what must be supplemented to the model for the robot to perform defined tasks within a construction site. The construction sites’ dynamic nature poses multiple challenges that must be addressed for the information extracted from a model to be used by a robot in daily construction operations. This research also identifies barriers and limitations based upon current practice, such as different levels of development or model content as well as needed precision within the information provided for a mobile robot to complete a defined task. 

One of the many ways in which automation may help the construction industry is on-site material management. This paper presents an automated process where materials are selected for staging by detecting construction progress from site images. The materials are then delivered to their respective workface locations by a robot. The effectiveness of the material selection process is assessed using a simulated and physical construction site. We demonstrate that our process is successful under a number of different conditions and environments. Our system contributes to the feasibility of autonomously managing materials on a construction site and reveals potential avenues for future research. 

This article examines how people respond to robot-administered verbal and physical punishments. Human participants were tasked with sorting colored chips under time pressure and were punished by a robot when they made mistakes, such as inaccurate sorting or sorting too slowly. Participants were either punished verbally by being told to stop sorting for a fixed time, or physically, by restraining their ability to sort with an in-house crafted robotic exoskeleton. Either a human experimenter or the robot exoskeleton administered punishments, with participant task performance and subjective perceptions of their interaction with the robot recorded. The results indicate that participants made more mistakes on the task when under the threat of robot-administered punishment. Participants also tended to comply with robot-administered punishments at a lesser rate than human-administered punishments, which suggests that humans may not afford a robot the social authority to administer punishments. This study also contributes to our understanding of compliance with a robot and whether people accept a robot’s authority to punish. The results may influence the design of robots placed in authoritative roles and promote discussion of the ethical ramifications of robot-administered punishment. 

This paper conceptualizes the problem of emergency evacuation as a paradigm for investigating human-robot interaction. We argue that emergency evacuation offers unique and important perspectives on human-robot interaction while also demanding close attention to the ethical ramifications of the technologies developed. We present a series of approaches for developing emergency evacuation robots and detail several essential design considerations. This paper concludes with a discussion of the ethical implications of emergency evacuation robots and a roadmap for their development, implementation, and evaluation. 

The purpose of this study was to survey the perspectives of clinicians regarding pediatric robotic exoskeletons and compare their views with the views of parents of children with disabilities. A total of 78 clinicians completed the survey; they were contacted through Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the American Academy for Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine, and group pages on Facebook. Most of the clinicians were somewhat concerned to very concerned that a child might not use the device safely outside of the clinical setting. Most clinicians reported that the child would try to walk, run, and climb using the exoskeleton. The parents reported higher trust (i.e., lower concern) in the child using an exoskeleton outside of the clinical setting, compared to the clinician group. Prior experience with robotic exoskeletons can have an important impact on each group’s expectations and self-reported level of trust in the technology.