**1.2 Building technology and service tasks**

Experts and masterminds, as for example Bill Gates, announce the era of service robotics and estimate that service robotics as part of assisted environments will undergo a similarly fast and rigid development as the spread of personal computers in private and economic areas since the nineties. In 1961, Joe Engelberger already wondered, whether using robotic technologies only as industrial applications makes any sense. "The biggest market will be service robots," [7] asserted Engelberger, who started the industrial robotics era, when his firm Unimation delivered GM's first robot. Today, the application of robotics and distributed robotic sub-systems finally starts to extend into our home, office and town surroundings. This transformation, which has to be understood as a natural part of the evolution of robotics, will become visible especially when robots enter the field of service, assistance and care [8]. We think that modern robotics assisting and serving human beings will permeate into the "surroundings" of daily life and thus become an integral part of our

Exoskeleton and Humanoid Robotic Technology in Construction and Built Environment 115

Concepts of Tele-Existence and Tele-Control to be used in the field of construction and building technology were advocated by Prof. Susumu Tachi at the University of Tokyo, already in 1980s. Tele-existence can be seen concept of advanced Tele-operation. Real world applications for tele-operated construction machinery as e.g. excavators and trucks had been developed in Japan since the Mount Unzen incident in 1991. A Vulcan eruption covered a large area with dust which would be health threatening for humans removing it. Thus a number of construction machines with the ability to be remote controlled from a save place had to be developed. Mt. Fugen is the main peak of Unzen Volcano, which is the collective name of a group of volcanic cones constituting the main part of the Shimabara Peninsula. Its phreatic eruption on 17 November 1990 caused a number of pyroclastic flows, which killed 44 people and destroyed 820 houses. The area around Mt. Fugen was deadly damaged by debris flow and pyroclastic flow. The restoration works to remove much stone and sand and the bank protection works were done by unmanned construction machines in order to avoid the risk of further catastrophes. Tele-operators manipulated machines from the operation room, which was more than 2km apart. Wearing special goggles, operators were watching 3D-images of the site sent by cameras equipped with machines. The efficiency of these remote-controlled works was estimated to be 70 percent of usual works [9]. Due to this incident Japanese researchers and construction companies realized the importance of tele-

Today intelligent excavators with the ability for tele-operation and even partly autonomous operation capability are under development in the R&D sections of all major Japanese and Korean contractors. Further Japanese researchers and construction companies have tried to control construction machinery by teleported humanoids (Figure 02). This approach has the

Tele-existence and Tele-control can not only be used for 1:1 real time control of a single robot or intelligent construction machine by one assigned operator. With rising degree of autonomy of the robot systems used the tele-operator becomes a sort of supervisor able to control multiple construction machines at once. Already in the 80s the vision of multiple cooperating construction robots are operated by a single human supervisor from a central existed (Figure 03). Today indeed more and more researchers succeed in developing fully functioning and highly autonomous construction machines that can be tele-supervised

advantage that standard construction machinery can be used without modification.

**Intuitive Control** 

**Control by Bio Signals**  Bio-electric Signals

operation technology.

(Figure 03).

Brainwaves

Vital Data (EKG, Blood Pressure, Respiration Frequency)

Electrons transmitted from Nervous System

**2.3 Tele-Existence & Tele-Control** 

 Motion Gesture Eye Movement

Force

built environment. Although building's interior environments and service environments tend to be less structured and standardized, increasingly autonomous robot systems can be applied to those environments. However, from a short term perspective, it will be easier to deploy not fully autonomous robotic systems as e.g. Suits for Power Assistance because they exploit human receptiveness and flexibility for robotic service.
