Human Centered Technologies for a Safer and Greener European Construction Industry

The European construction industry faces three major challenges: improve its productivity, increase the safety and wellbeing of its workforce and make a shift towards a green, resource efficient industry. To address these challenges adequately, HumanTech proposes a human-centered approach, involving breakthrough technologies such as wearables for worker safety and support, and intelligent robotic technology that can harmoniously co-exist with human workers while also contributing to the green transition of the industry. Our aim is to achieve major advances beyond the current state-of-the-art in all these technologies, that can have a disruptive effect in the way construction is conducted by a new generation of highly skilled, male and female construction workers and engineers, working in a safe and rewarding digitally enabled environment. These advances will include: Introduction of robotic devices equipped with vision and intelligence to enable them to navigate autonomously and safely in a highly unstructured environment, collaborate with humans and dynamically update a semantic digital twin of the construction site. Visual information capturing will extend to multispectral imaging enabling detection of material composition of built structures besides geometric characteristics. Intelligent unobtrusive workers protection and support equipment ranging from exoskeletons triggered by wearable body pose and strain sensors, to wearable cameras and XR glasses to provide real-time worker localisation and guidance for the efficient and accurate fulfilment of their tasks. An entirely new breed of Dynamic Semantic Digital Twins (DSDTs) of construction sites simulating in detail the current state of a construction site at geometric and semantic level, based on an extended BIM formulation encompassing all relevant structural and semantic dimensions (BIMxD). BIMxDs will act as a common reference for all human workers, engineers and autonomous machines.