Robot-Integrated 4D Building Information Modeling (4D BIM): Framework for Planning Safe Autonomous Construction Operations in Dynamic Environments

In the construction industry, the use of autonomous robots is considered a solution to overcome the heavy reliance on human workers to perform repetitive, strenuous, and hazardous tasks. While these robots offer the advantage of autonomous operation, ensuring their safe and efficient integration within construction sites requires precise planning. Such planning must account for the varying project complexities such as scope, site layout, tasks, timelines, existence of human workers, and other spatiotemporal conditions of the construction site. Currently, there are no methods to safely plan autonomous robot operations considering these factors within the overarching construction planning process. Thus, autonomous robots operating independently cannot understand and adapt to the ever-changing conditions of the construction site. 4D BIM-related technologies represent arguably the most advanced method of planning for projects considering the spatiotemporal context of the construction site. They can provide a rough simulation and visualization of how a construction project is expected to progress over time. However, they lack the capabilities to plan and simulate the elemental motions of autonomous robots. This poses a major challenge to planning robot operations for construction tasks considering their spatial coordination with human workers and site conditions. To address this challenge, the goal of this research is to create a method to plan and execute autonomous robot operations considering the spatiotemporal of the construction site. To achieve this, a prototype 4D BIM-based robot task planner will be developed to plan autonomous robot operations with the framework of 4D BIM. Subsequently, a rule-based system for detecting potentially unsafe situations during the planning process will be developed and integrated into the planner. Then, a method for mitigating the detected potentially unsafe situations is developed to ensure the planner can be used safely and efficiently plan autonomous construction robot operations. The proposed task planner is then evaluated for planning construction tasks through comprehensive case studies. The research will demonstrate the importance of planning autonomous robot operations in the context of 4D BIM.Advisor: Kyungki Kim