Article:

Advanced manufacturing and robotic fabrication for the housing constructionindustry is mainly focused on the use of industrial robots in the pre-fabricationstage. Yet to be fully developed is the use on-site of collaborative robots, able towork cooperatively with humans in a range of construction trades. Our studyfocuses on the trade of carpentry in small-to-medium size enterprises in theAustralian construction industry, seeking to understand and identify opportunitiesin the current workflows of carpenters for the role of collaborative robots. Priorto presenting solutions for this problem, we first developed a novel methodologyfor the capture and analysis of the body movements of carpenters, resulting in asuite of visual resources to aid us in thinking through where, what, and how acollaborative robot could participate in the carpentry task. We report on thechallenges involved, and outline how the results of applying this methodology willinform the next stage of our research.