As the new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation progresses, scientific research is expanding towards the macroscopic, delving into the microscopic, and advancing into extreme conditions, which becoming the developmental trends at the forefront of global science and technology. With the implementation of national strategies such as the high-quality development of green and low-carbon, China faces a series of new scientific and technological challenges in the field of construction under extreme environments. Among these, construction robotics in extreme environments, which meets the needs for high-risk operations, highly repetitive labor, and high-precision tasks, improving construction efficiency and safety, has been identified as a key development direction in the robotics strategies of countries worldwide.
Construction robotics in extreme environments are defined as robots capable of performing complex engineering construction tasks autonomously in various extreme environments without human intervention. These include hazardous work environments such as blasting operations, demolition operations, post-disaster rescue operations, and confined space operations; polluted and harmful environments such as dust-polluted environments, solid waste-polluted environments, and nuclear-polluted environments; and harsh natural environments including deep underground, deep sea, and deep space environments. The key scientific and technological challenges of constructing robotics in extreme environments, and how to achieve biomimetic mechanism design, real-time environmental perception, autonomous motion planning, and intelligent decision control for these robots under extreme conditions, have garnered extensive attention and discussion within the academic community, becoming a frontier of research in the intersecting fields of construction and robotics.
This groundbreaking research systematically reviewed and summarized the key scientific technologies and research progress of construction robots in extreme environments from Earth to space. The research team analyzed the typical application scenarios faced by construction robots in extreme environments, such as hazardous work environments, polluted and harmful environments, and harsh natural environments. The team elucidated the four key technical performance aspects of construction robots in extreme environments, including mechanism, perception, planning, and control.
The implications of this research underscore the current critical scientific and technological challenges faced by construction robots in extreme environments, including how to ensure the effectiveness, safety, and reliability of robotic operations under conditions of unstructured environments, limited observational methods, and multi-objective constraints. Furthermore, they forecasted the future research directions of construction robotics in extreme environments, and proposed the frontier development trends in the interdisciplinary field of intelligent construction and intelligent robotics.
The paper "Construction Robotics in Extreme Environments: From Earth to Space" has been published in Engineering, authored by Ke You, Cheng Zhou, Lieyun Ding, Yuxiang Wang. Full text of the open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2024.11.037.
