The introduction of robots is widely considered to have significant potential of alleviating the issues of worker shortage and stagnant productivity that afflict the construction industry. However, it is challenging to use fully automated robots in complex and unstructured construction sites. Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) has shown promise of combining human workers' flexibility and robot assistants' physical abilities to jointly address the uncertainties inherent in construction work. When introducing HRC in construction, it is critical to recognize the importance of teamwork and supervision in field construction and establish a natural and intuitive communication system for the human workers and robotic assistants. Natural language-based interaction can enable intuitive and familiar communication with robots for human workers who are non-experts in robot programming. However, limited research has been conducted on this topic in construction. This paper proposes a framework to allow human workers to interact with construction robots based on natural language instructions. The proposed method consists of three stages: Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Information Mapping (IM), and Robot Control (RC). Natural language instructions are input to a language model to predict a tag for each word in the NLU module. The IM module uses the result of the NLU module and building component information to generate the final instructional output essential for a robot to acknowledge and perform the construction task. A case study for drywall installation is conducted to evaluate the proposed approach. The obtained results highlight the potential of using natural language-based interaction to replicate the communication that occurs between human workers within the context of human-robot teams.

翻译：机器人技术的引入普遍被认为具有缓解建筑行业劳动力短缺和生产率停滞问题的巨大潜力。然而，在复杂且非结构化的施工现场使用全自动机器人面临挑战。人机协作（Human-Robot Collaboration, HRC）通过结合人类工人的灵活性与机器人助手的物理能力，有望共同应对施工作业中固有的不确定性。在建筑领域引入人机协作时，需认识到现场施工中团队协作与监督的重要性，并为人类工人与机器人助手建立自然直观的通信系统。基于自然语言的交互方式可使非机器人编程专业的人类工人以直观熟悉的方式与机器人进行沟通。然而，目前建筑领域对此类研究尚十分有限。本文提出一种框架，使人类工人能够基于自然语言指令与施工机器人进行交互。该方法包含三个阶段：自然语言理解（Natural Language Understanding, NLU）、信息映射（Information Mapping, IM）和机器人控制（Robot Control, RC）。自然语言指令输入语言模型，在NLU模块中预测每个单词的标签；IM模块利用NLU模块结果与建筑构件信息生成机器人完成施工任务所需的最终指令输出。通过干墙安装案例研究评估所提出方法，结果表明基于自然语言交互可复现人机团队中人类工人间的沟通模式。