Towards a Collaborative Future in Construction Robotics: A Human-centered Study in a Multi-user Immersive Operation and Communication System for Excavation

— When operating a construction robot, i.e., an excavator, the excavator operator’s unsafe behavior directly affects the underground utility damage occurrence during excavation process. Operator’s behavior is greatly affected by the environment and further the communication with other coworkers, i.e., spotter. In this paper, we propose a multi-user immersive operation and communication system for excavation. Further, we investigate how the different types of environments and operator-spotter communication channels affect operator’s attention demand and performance during excavation.