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Advances in robotics now permit humans to work collaboratively with robots. However, humans often feel unsafe working alongside robots. Our knowledge of how to help humans overcome this issue is limited by two challenges. One, it is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to prototype robots and set up various work situations needed to conduct studies in this area. Two, we lack strong theoretical models to predict and explain perceived safety and its influence on human-robot work collaboration (HRWC). To address these issues, we introduce the Robot Acceptance Safety Model (RASM) and employ immersive virtual environments (IVEs) to examine perceived safety of working on tasks alongside a robot. Results from a between-subjects experiment done in an IVE show that separation of work areas between robots and humans increases perceived safety by promoting team identification and trust in the robot. In addition, the more participants felt it was safe to work with the robot, the more willing they were to work alongside the robot in the future.

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Earthwork is seemingly guesswork, but it requires a high level of accuracy and precise planning. Differences between earthwork design and finishing levels cause project delays and cost overrun due to the time-consuming nature of earthwork re-work. Therefore, error-free earthwork planning and design review is a key to the success of earthwork projects. This study utilized an integrated approach of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based point cloud and BIM (Building Information Modeling) to verify the design and to operate the earthwork planning. The integrated approach was proposed and applied to a 420 square meters housing construction project to review an original earthwork design and create an earthwork plan for excavator work. As a result, errors in earthwork design that caused by inaccurate initial DEM was revealed, thus the earthwork design was revised with a UAV-based point cloud map. Additionally, the integrated approach was able to generate an explicit task sequence for an excavator.

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