Research Seminar Series: Kereshmeh Afsari
NYU CUSP is pleased to host our annual Research Seminar Series, featuring leading voices in the growing field of urban informatics. The seminars will examine real-world challenges facing cities and urban environments around the world, with topics ranging from citizen and social sciences to smart infrastructure.
Human-Robot Teaming in On-Site Inspection and Monitoring
Inspection and monitoring are essential in construction processes and require a set of regular activities to ensure the quality of construction work, to track the progress of the project, and to verify that the work being completed is consistent with the project requirements (e.g., drawings, schedule, and cost). This involves a set of inspection tasks with repetitive in-person observations of the job site. Current manual inspection process in construction is time-consuming, inefficient and inconsistent mainly due to human limitations in the ability to persistently and accurately inspect the job site during the construction process and compare the as-built status with as-planned project data. Robotic technologies have the potential to assist the human inspector to address existing limitations and inefficiencies of the manual process. But construction sites are dynamically changing unstructured environments that make the integration of autonomous robots very challenging. This presentation explains human-technology partnership in inspection and monitoring and describes the latest development in the use of emerging technologies including reality capture and AR/VR integrated with quadruped robots as an assistant to human inspectors on live construction sites.
About the Speaker
Kereshmeh Afsari is an Assistant Professor in the Myers-Lawson School of Construction (MLSoC) at Virginia Tech. Dr. Afsari holds a Ph.D. degree in Architecture (Design Computation) from Georgia Institute of Technology and an MSc in Digital Architectural Design from Salford University, UK and a joint BS/MS in Architectural Engineering from IUST, Iran. Dr. Afsari’s research is at the intersection of computational science and the built environment focused on emerging technologies and robotics for smart building design and construction. She is the founder and managing director of the Automation and Robotics in Construction and Design Engineering (ARCADE) research lab in the MLSoC.