Human-Robot Collaborative Workflow for Remote Decommissioning and Demolition

Abstract

The demand for new deconstruction and demolition approaches is escalating as structures built in 20th century development booms approach their end of life. Rehabilitation and careful deconstruction approaches are increasingly economically and environmentally motivating. For example, in Ontario, Canada multi-decade efforts to decommission nuclear power plants are challenging teams of engineers, researchers, venders, and laborers. In these hazardous scenarios, classical heavy demolition approaches are not an option, and the asset owners find that the costly development of novel workflows and technologies to plan and undergo these deconstruction operations is the only option. These trends present construction researchers with an opportunity to develop technologies and processes to achieve
deconstruction project goals with improved efficiency, certainty, and safety. This paper presents a modular framework for remote human-robot collaboration for waste management in decommissioning and demolition. The proposed framework includes robotic platform reality data capture, scan processing (e.g., segmentation, surface estimation, and recognition), gamified waste packing in virtual reality (VR), and packing plan execution. A comprehensive review of state-of-the-art technologies of each module is explored from the standpoint of applicability to deconstruction and demolition. Then, an autonomous robotic platform for reality data capture is presented. A reconfigurable semi-automated VR platform for waste packing optimization is presented as an example of this process workflow in the context of remote deconstruction and demolition. Finally, the ideas of robotic packing plan execution are discussed as future work.