Civil Engineering & Construction: Faculty Publications

Structuring Motion-Based Communication as a Language for Robotics

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-27-2025

Publication Title

Proceedings of the 42nd International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction, ISARC 2025

DOI

10.22260/ISARC2025/0065

ISBN

9780645832228

Abstract

The construction industry is currently facing a labor shortage, prompting many researchers and practitioners to explore construction automation through advancements in robotics. For successful construction operations with multiple agents, effective and intuitive communication is essential. To this end, this research proposes a Motion-Based Communication (MBC) framework, which enables collaboration using movement. MBC provides a robust alternative that remains unaffected by various types of disruptions. This work contributes to the field of robotics by developing a motion-based language represented through an ontology. The ontological representation is encoded via directional shifts in motion rather than poses and is decoded by analyzing optical flow vectors. The experimental results in a lab environment using a UR5e robot indicate feasibility, with a shift inference accuracy of 98.8%. These findings can contribute to the development of a multi-agent MBC language to support communication in real time during construction operations.

Comments

Publisher Copyright: © 2025 Proceedings of the International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction. All rights reserved.

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