Pictobot: A Cooperative Painting Robot for Interior Finishing of Industrial Developments

TLDR

Human‑robot collaboration is rapidly expanding across industries, with research suggesting robots augment rather than replace workers and case studies demonstrating their use in construction tasks such as glazing. The study employs a human‑robot dialogue system and immersive virtual environments to facilitate collaborative construction tasks and assess human trust and safety. Deploying robots collaboratively with humans is viewed as a catalyst for significant productivity gains in interior finishing and other construction tasks.

Abstract

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) [1], [2] is a vastly developing field in diverse industries such as health care [3], industrial assembly [4], search and rescue, home service [5], and construction [6], [7]. Many researchers believe that robots will enhance human workers, not replace them, as they do not have the same capability to evaluate and correct their work in real time. Lee [8] introduces case studies on glazing robot technology for installing glass panels on construction sites. A human-robot dialogue system [9] has been developed in joint-action science and technology to solve a construction task collaboratively with a human. The use of immersive virtual environments is also reported in [10] to evaluate human trust and perceived safety in response to robot actions during a collaborative construction. Deploying robots in collaboration with humans is seen as an enabler of major changes in construction productivity for various tasks, such as interior finishing.