Undergraduate research project focuses on multi-robot systems in construction

There are four undergraduate students working collaboratively on this project. They are from Construction Engineering and Management. Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. We're basically integrating two different robotic systems. One arial robot, the other a ground robot. We work as an assistant to a human inspector so that we can improve construction safety, increase productivity and accuracy of construction with the use of emerging technologies. So, the way we have it setup right now is that the husky and the drone communicate with a back end server, and that server is what sends the controls that it receives from the actual human inspector. In that server, it has instance of drone and husky, and they also have all the collected data from each of this device. So basically, that's kind of way of them communicating. One of my contributions to the project was designing a mount for the Huskies camera to be held up on. And then also creating the simulation using MATLAB, Simulink, ROS, and Gazebo to simulate the robots and the drones inside that system so we can run tests and see how they would behave. I have the experience of, you know, what inspectors and construction workers are looking for. You know, it needs to be able to be robust, you know. Even the robots themselves need to be robust so they can take a beating. Just something that's for the construction workers and those on site to be able to understand from their point of view. The main point here was to bring together multiple perspectives and undergraduate students who don't normally work with each other in research projects. So in this project, they can learn research methodologies, as well as how to work together. Undergrad research is one of the high impact practices. So, it's really shown to help students elevate their learning and part of experiential learning, so they're really getting hands on experience, applying what they're learning in classes to solve real world problems. Having a multifaceted project where we're all touching different components and applying our skill sets is, I think, rewarding to me, and I'm learning from everyone. Without help with peers, we probably wouldn't have any understanding of how construction works. And we couldn't really figure out what we really need to do. We're just contributing more as a team to this project than we could each individually. I've learned a lot from the computer science majors, and the mechanical majors. Running simulations, seeing how the code kind of works. So, it's really beneficial to me to be able to see the different perspectives other people bring to this.