This paper discusses the results of a survey regarding state of the art and possible future opportunities for the application of robotic technologies in the construction industry. The survey was conducted by submitting two distinct questionnaires to Arup's1 most experienced technical and business leaders. The first questionnaire was designed in order to understand the state of the art of robotic technologies in the construction industry, while the second one aimed at identifying promising application scenarios from both the industry and the research point of view. The paper discusses how the questionnaires have been designed and presents the corresponding results.

Working machines in construction sites or emergency scenarios can operate in situations that can be dangerous to an operator both\ud for direct control of the machine or teleoperation in co-presence. Remote operation has been typically hindered by limited sense\ud of presence of the operator in the remote of the environment to due the reduced field of view of cameras. Starting from these\ud considerations we are introducing a novel real-time panoramic telepresence system for construction machines. This system does\ud allow fully immersive operations in critical scenarios while keeping the operator in a safe location at moderate distance from the\ud construction site. An omnidirectional stereo vision head mounted over the machine acquires and streams data to the operator with a\ud streaming technique that focuses on the current direction of site of the operator. According to the motion of the operators head, the\ud telepresence system will determine the involved cameras to use and the appropriate region of interest in cameras. The operator uses\ud a head-mounted display to experience the remote site also with the possibility to view digital information overlaid to the remote\ud scene as a type of augmented reality. The paper addresses the design and architecture of the system starting from the vision system\ud and then proceeding to the immersive visualizatio

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This letter presents a novel wearable haptic controller (WHC) system suitable for teleoperation of demolition machines and robotic platforms. With regard to existing operator controller unit composed by passive joysticks, the WHC has been designed to provide force feedback to the user, hence improving the user perfor- mance during the teleoperation of different robotic platforms and the interaction with the environment on the remote construction sites. The haptic feedback is provided through two compact parallel kinematic (CPK) interfaces that will be presented within the paper. The CPK implements a novel variant of the Delta kinematics which allows minimizing the radial encumbrance while preserving same operational workspace. In addition, we propose a new interaction modality that provides users the feeling of directly maneuvering the end-effector of the demolition machine. Finally, the architec- ture of the proposed system is presented and the results of some preliminary evaluation tests are discussed. The experiments have been performed in simulated environments and on a real machine

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