Digital twin-enabled safety monitoring system for seamless worker-robot collaboration in construction

Abstract

Worker-robot collaboration (WRC) has emerged as a transformative approach to augmenting the productivity of the construction industry. However, the development of a safety monitoring method or system for stopping robot operations in emergency is imperative, especially for seamless WRC on site. This paper presents a digital twin-enabled safety monitoring system for seamless WRC on site, characterized by its comprehensive perception of dynamic entities and dynamic calculation of protective separation distances during seamless WRC. The effectiveness of the proposed system is substantiated through a series of experiments, the result demonstrates its proficiency in mitigating collisions during robot operation in both static and dynamic WRC scenarios. The system achieves an average monitoring rate of 9.8 frames per second, an average reaction latency of 0.177 s, and a positional perception error of 0.09 m. It not only provides a practical tool for the implementation of seamless WRC on site, but also offers valuable insights for future WRC research.