Hallway exploration-inspired guidance: applications in autonomous material transportation in construction sites

Abstract Continued attempts have been conducted to improve construction productivity with automatic material transportation robots, yet neither of them has been popularized. The reason is that navigating in highly unstructured and dynamic indoor environments remains a great challenge. Therefore, we present a hallway exploration-inspired guidance approach (HEIGA), which guides an agent to its destination based on a series of directional guidance without the need for self-localization in a global frame. A series of experiments were conducted which prove that fully autonomous material transportation can be realized without being influenced by the complexity or dynamics of real construction sites. We expect this new approach to effectively: (i)free workers from heavy and repetitive material transportation tasks; and (ii) improve construction productivity. In the future, the presented approach will be applied in construction sites considering multi-robot collaboration, aiming at a higher material transportation efficiency.