A Generic Communication Library for Human-Robot Interaction on Construction Sites

Abstract

After a first decade of re-discovery of robotic technologies via design-oriented experiments, “digital fabrication” specialists are starting to reach technical limitations common to pre-existing industrial machinery research communities. In their quest for applications of robotics in construction sites and prefabrication plants, their work heavily rely on available programming and communication utilities, and ultimately on the underlying constructor-specific languages and protocols that these interfaces are based on. These last layers, including their documentation, are unfortunately limited by manufacturers for security or intellectual property reasons, resulting in technical limitations which affect naturally the whole research field. One of these bottlenecks is the absence (or lack of abstraction) of unified communication services available between machines themselves, their operators and additional sensing devices which continuously inform the two pre-mentioned types of industrial actors. In order to tackle this problem, this paper proposes a new communication protocol allowing high-frequency structured messaging between robot controllers and external clients over regular TCP/IP networks, and respecting the full abstraction of each robot programming platforms. As a conclusion, we exemplify the use of such service in a couple of application scenarios adapted to construction sites.