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：机器人引入被广泛认为具有缓解建筑行业劳动力短缺和生产力停滞问题的巨大潜力。然而，在复杂且非结构化的建筑工地中，使用完全自主的机器人极具挑战性。人机协作展现了结合人类工人的灵活性与机器人助手的物理能力、共同应对建筑作业固有不确定性的前景。在建筑领域引入人机协作时，必须认识到现场作业中团队合作与监督的重要性，并为人类工人和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使非机器人编程专业的人类工人能够以直观且熟悉的方式与机器人沟通。然而，目前建筑领域对此主题的研究有限。本文提出一个框架，使人类工人能够通过自然语言指令与建筑机器人交互。所提方法包括三个阶段：自然语言理解、信息映射和机器人控制。自然语言指令输入语言模型，在自然语言理解模块中预测每个单词的标签。信息映射模块利用自然语言理解模块的结果和建筑构件信息，生成机器人执行建筑任务所需的关键最终指令输出。通过石膏板安装的案例研究评估所提方法，结果凸显了利用基于自然语言的交互来复现人类工人在人机团队中沟通方式的潜力。