AI Enabled Automatic Mobile Robot Intelligent Navigation in Construction With Obstacle Awareness

Abstract

In the construction industry, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics has led to significant advancements in automating various tasks. One critical aspect is the intelligent navigation of automatic mobile robot (AMR) within construction sites, where dynamic environments pose challenges such as inaccurate robot state estimation, irregular and textureless obstacle detection. To solve these issues, this paper designs an AI enabled obstacle-aware AMR intelligent navigation approach while ensuring robot safety and efficiency. Specifically, the robot is equipped with the complementary RGB camera, inertial measurement unit (IMU) and wheel encoder to estimate the states (i.e., positions, orientations and velocities), which have been tightly fused in the optimization framework. Furthermore, the RGB-Depth images are jointly fed into the AI model. It combines of Mask-RCNN and multi-scale attention network, to detect and segment the obstacles, and estimate the corresponding relative depth. It should be noted that the system incorporates obstacle awareness mechanisms to dynamically switch the robot’s velocities in response to obstacles in the environment, ensuring smooth and collision-free movement. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed AI-enabled navigation system in real-world construction scenarios, showcasing its potential to enhance productivity and safety in construction automation.