It is February 2023, and we are in the ninth month of our project to transform construction into a safer, more inclusive and greener industry.
In December, the three things that Jason Rambach, our Project Coordinator, highlighted from our first six months of progress were:
- We have started our field activities by collecting a large-scale multisensory building 3D point cloud dataset.
- We have gained recognition for our research, receiving awards at the European Computer Vision Conference (ECCV) and the Best Paper Award at the European Council on Computing in Construction (EC³).
- We have participated in our first events and made our first media appearances, allowing us to disseminate our work to a broader public.
“In the coming months, we will continue to work on our technical work packages for the generation of digital building twins, construction wearables and robotics. We look forward to making some of our newly acquired building data available to the scientific community”, said Jason.
We are also very excited to organise our first workshop at the European Robotics Forum with two other Horizon Europe projects in the construction field, RoBétArmé and BEEYONDERS, on March 15th.
Where are we now in development? What are our plans for this new stage of the project? We spoke to the Work Package leaders that make up HumanTech, and this is what they told us.
Work Package 1: Overall Framework Definition
Jason Rambach, HumanTech Project Coordinator and Senior Researcher and Team Leader in Spatial Sensing and Machine Perception at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI): For Work Package 1, we will be happy to present our public deliverable on the “HumanTech Vision and research requirements” very soon. Planned for March 2023, it contains inputs based on the expertise of many of our project partners. It will paint an accurate picture of the current state of digital twins, wearables and robotics in construction as well as our plans for advancing the state-of-the-art in HumanTech. Additionally, after several long discussions, we have established a first version of our HumanTech architecture at the system and data level, which we will present in deliverable D1.2.”
“The deliverable we are working on will paint an accurate picture of the current state of digital twins, wearables and robotics in construction, as well as our plans for advancing the state-of-the-art in HumanTech.”
Work Package 2: BIMxD Formats and Standardization
Andrea Giordano, Professor at the Department of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering – ICEA, Università degli Studi di Padova: “The activities of the Work Package 2 are based on the development of the standardisation of the HumanTech activities, based on international standards. Our plans for the next months are related to the creation of the platform’s main characteristic and to the definition of the exchange requirements of the other Work Packages. The standardisation of the process and the data using the buildingSmart data dictionary (bSDD) are, in fact, related to the kind of information that can be reused from the BIM models and the point cloud segmentation for an optimisation of the resource. The group members’ collaboration will allow us to organise the dedicated platform.”
Work Package 3: Dynamic Semantic Digital Twin Generation
Bharath Sankaran, CTO and Co-founder of Naska.AI: “On the one hand, while our team at RICOH will continue improving and testing their RGB-D sensor prototype, ZHAW and Naska.AI will develop their Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) data capture platforms, and work together to integrate the RICOH Theta 360 camera. The platforms and sensors will be tested and evaluated throughout the year on real construction sites provided by our Work Package 3 partners, Acciona and Implenia.
On the other hand, led by DFKI, other partners will work on developing semantic segmentation algorithms, using the data collected with our sensors to train their machine-learning algorithms.
Finally, RPTU (formerly TUK – Technical University of Kaiserslautern), will continue developing algorithms to turn pointclouds and semantic information into BIM models.”
Work Package 4: Wearable Technologies for Construction
Bruno Mirbach, Senior Researcher at DFKI: “In Work Package 4, we are developing a wearable visual-internal-sensor system. A surround-view camera developed by RICOH will be integrated with the body sensing system of Sci-Track. The combination of these sensors enables both a simultaneous monitoring of the environment and localisation of the worker therein and a precise and robust 3D-tracking of the workers’ postures and movements.
The next step in Work Package 4 will be to develop an intention recognition based on this information and to implement an action-dependent automatic activation of an exoskeleton, which supports the worker in specific physically stressful actions.”
“The technology we are developing enables both a simultaneous monitoring of the environment and localisation of the worker therein and a precise and robust 3D-tracking of the workers’ postures and movements.”
Work Package 5: Construction Robotics and Human-Robot Collaboration
Gabor Sziebig, Research Manager at SINTEF: “Work Package 5 started on 1st November 2022 and is progressing with rapid steps. Baubot started to build the new generation of Mobile Collaborative Robotic System (called MRS5-1920), while the rest of the partners involved are focusing on the research and development of the necessary parts for the robotic platform and the pilots, building up the HumanTech vision.
The Work Package 5 team met on the 1st February 2023 in Madrid, Spain, to get hands-on experience with two of our planned pilots (bricklaying and mastic application) and is arranging a Special Session on the 19th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts, which will take place in Berlin, Germany, June 5th-7th 2023. Meet us there!”
Work Package 6: Human Factors – Training and Usability Assessment
Gloria Callinan, Project Support Officer at the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS): “At TUS, we continue to work with our project partners on curricula for micro-learning units, the first of which should be ready in Q1 2024.
Our partners at Tecnalia are preparing the subjective assessment for the technologies being developed in HumanTech through dedicated workshops with final users to measure a worker’s acceptance degree and how the perceived usefulness can improve it. This assessment will be done by the own workers, designers and researchers.
Our main goal? To celebrate one workshop with 40 workers (20 male and 20 female). The material for moderators participating in the focus groups has been prepared with self-exploration questionnaires to measure the experiential users’ objectives and interaction. It will be analysed afterwards and conclusions will be drawn.”
Work Package 7: Pilots, Evaluation and Validation
Fabian Kaufmann, Researcher at RPTU: “At Work Package 7, we are leading the use case coordination with Work Packages 2, 3, 4, and 5. As the research tasks are now starting, there is a lot of coordination necessary.
As Gabor has mentioned, we visited one of our pilot sites on the 1st February in Madrid and were able to check the site conditions, challenges and opportunities for pilot implementation. Also, we are analysing manual tasks such as bricklaying and mastic application collaboratively with other Work Packages and will continue to schedule and plan our activities for the coming months!”
Work Package 8: Outreach, Exploitation and Collaboration
Giulia Pastor, Project Manager at AUSTRALO: “On Work Package 8, we are coordinating with our sister projects, BEEYONDERS and RoBétArmé, to promote our first workshop, “AI and Robotics in Construction”, which will be held on March 15th at the European Robotics Forum (ERF) 2023.
“We are pushing the promotion of our first workshop, “AI and Robotics in Construction”, which we have organised with our sister projects, BEEYONDERS and RoBétArmé, during the European Robotics Forum 2023 and will take place on March 15th.”
Our first technical publication, in which our Project Coordinator, Jason Rambach, has participated, is available: “OPA-3D: Occlusion-Aware Pixel-Wise Aggregation for Monocular 3D Object Detection.”
We are continuing our series of interviews with the HumanTech team to learn about their work and share their vision of the positive impact we will generate with this ambitious project. In addition, we are working on a campaign on gender equality in the digital and technological environment on the occasion of the upcoming International Women’s Day 2023, whose theme is “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”.
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