Project Details
Projekt
Multi-robot collaboration for monitoring and inspection of civil engineering structures
Applicant
Professor Dr.-Ing. Kay Smarsly
Subject Area
Structural Engineering, Building Informatics and Construction Operation
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517965147
Monitoring and inspection, bolstered by the advancements in Internet-of-Things technologies, are vital tools for evaluating the performance of construction projects and, in turn, ensure structural safety, save time, and reduce costs. However, when conducted manually, monitoring and inspection tasks are time-consuming, error-prone, and costly. To overcome these drawbacks, deploying robotic systems to automatically execute monitoring and inspection tasks is a promising approach, which requires robust concepts that ensure reliable and efficient multi-robot collaboration. Although multi-robot collaboration is not new, existing approaches are commonly restricted to robotic systems of one robot type responsible for one task, the potential of the semantics inherent to digital building models has not been fully exploited, and the uncontrolled on-site environments place challenges to the existing approaches that have not yet sufficiently been solved, which, in total, renders multi-robot collaboration in on-site environments a complex engineering task that will be addressed in this subproject. The goal of this subproject is to advance multi-robot collaboration, aiming to support monitoring and inspection of civil engineering structures. Integrating different robot types for solving different tasks, this subproject will take advantage of the semantics provided by existing digital building models. Drawing from a common starting point that aligns all subprojects with the information backbone of the overall research unit, a semantic inspection model will be developed, based on a semantic analysis of civil engineering structures and a formalization of monitoring and inspection activities. In addition to the semantic inspection model, a semantic multi-robot collaboration model for monitoring and inspection of civil engineering structures will be developed by conceptualizing the behavior and capabilities of robots using state machines and class diagrams. The aforementioned semantic models will be formalized in the form of ontologies, and the correctness will be verified through model checking. The semantic models will then converge into a collaborative multi-robot inspection methodology, which represents the core of this sub project. The methodology allows, in a generic way, to generate and optimize tasks and plans for monitoring and inspection, based on digital building models. The methodology couples the aforementioned semantic models with reasoning techniques, description and temporal logic, and with multi-agent technology. For validating the proposed methodology, virtual experiments (i.e. simulations) as well as physical experiments (i.e., laboratory and field tests) will be conducted. As a result, it is expected that monitoring and inspection may be improved by reliable and efficient multi-robot collaboration valid for different types of robotic systems that make use of the semantics inherent to digital building models readily available in civil engineering.
DFG Programme
Research Units
