Real-Time and Remote Construction Progress Monitoring with a Quadruped Robot Using Augmented Reality

Abstract

Construction progress monitoring involves a set of inspection tasks with repetitive in-person observations on the site. The current manual inspection process in construction is time-consuming, inefficient and inconsistent mainly due to human limitations in the ability to persistently and accurately walkthrough the job site and observe the as-built status of which robots are considerably better. Enabling the process of visual inspection with a real-time and remote inspection capability using robots can provide more frequent and accessible construction progress data for inspectors to improve the quality of inspection and monitoring. Also, integrating remote inspection with an Augmented Reality (AR) platform can help the inspector to verify as-planned BIM data with the as-built status. This paper proposes a new approach to perform remote monitoring of the construction progress in real-time using a quadruped robot and an AR solution. The proposed computational framework in this study uses a cloud-based solution to integrate the quadruped robot’s control for remote navigation through the construction site with 360° live-stream video of the construction status, as well as a real-time AR solution to visualize and compare the as-built status with as-planned BIM geometry. The implementation of the proposed framework is discussed, and the developed framework is evaluated in two use cases through experimental investigations.