Toward Autonomous Construction Material Inventory Management using a Boston Dynamics SPOT and Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Passive RFID

Abstract

Construction materials account for a significant percentage of the resources on a construction site and plays a vital role in the success of the project. By utilizing an experimental methodology, the goal of this research was to execute a proof of concept for autonomous inventory management of construction materials using Ultra-High Frequency passive RFID and a terrestrial autonomous robot. An experiment was administered to identify the reliability (tags read vs. tags placed) of the proposed system in a dynamic environment in autonomous mode. According to the results, the robot was largely able to navigate around and between smaller objects versus larger obstacles. Using Bootstrap simulation, the successful read rate (percent) was found to be [67,88] [LL, UL] at a 95 percent confidence interval. Based on the results, using a Boston Dynamics SPOT with UHF Passive RFID to control building material inventories could be a viable route with additional research. Future research will improve material management through RFID, computer vision, and Bayes Filters for localization.