Three Projects Advancing the Role of Robotics in Civil Engineering
Robotics is beginning to play a larger role in civil engineering, where robots could increasingly serve as a helpful tool. With the assistance of robotics, humans could be taken out of dangerous work zones, and jobs could require less back-breaking labor.
Multiple Stony Brook University faculty members are tackling robotics head-on to solve modern-day issues. Among these faculty are Assistant Professors Wei Li, Ci-Jyun (Polar) Liang and Paolo Celli, members of the Department of Civil Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Rigoberto Burgueno, chair of the Civil Engineering Department, said, “We are very excited about the success that our faculty are having in this emerging area in civil engineering. The growth of the research and educational mission of our young department has been guided by the vision of expanding the role and impact of civil engineering in modern society, and the work being conducted by Professors Celli, Li, and Liang exemplifies the transdisciplinary nature of our faculty’s research and the value that civil engineering brings to emerging technological areas.”
Tactile Sensing Robots
Wei Li is currently working on a research project aimed to create tactile sensing robots that are able to perceive and handle delicate materials.
The project is in collaboration with Assistant Professor Shaoting Lin at Michigan State University and Assistant Professor Yu She of Purdue University. The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded them a research grant for a total of three years.
Li, a co-PI, joined Stony Brook University a little more than two years ago and is trained as a geotechnical engineer. This current project stems from his experimental research on granular material.
The research utilizes photoelasticity, a property of transparent materials to become doubly refracting. For example, a ray of light may split into two rays when traveling through a photoelastic material.
“We wanted to study how the particles in granular media interacted with each other,” said Li. “We can see material light up and change color when they are under stress. It is a really powerful experimental technique we can apply to study granular media. We developed photoporomechanics to visualize and measure effective stress.”
Li and his team figured out how to miniaturize the photoelastic sensing technology into the fingertip of a robot. With this technology, the robot can sense if an object is soft or rigid, or rough or smooth. Through other developing techniques, the robot also has the potential to visualize sensations in 3D.
The robot sensing technology possesses more advantages than human touch. The robot can not only sense more than our fingertips, but also can handle delicate material, such as jellyfish and silky tofu, with more finesse than human hands.
“In the future this can be applied to medical robots for surgery and also underwater robots,” said Li. “Trying to catch and handle and explore marine life that is very soft can be very challenging for traditional robots.”
The next step in the research is to optimize and miniaturize the design. The applications of their research are limitless, such as making it possible to conduct jobs in locations that require delicate work that may not be safe for people.
“We are already making use of a robot’s power and its strength to conduct construction work,” said Li. “Having robots with a delicate sense of touch will enable them to do things they could not do before. These new discoveries and exciting ideas from my students and seeing how they progress has been a very rewarding process.”
Human-Robot Collaboration in Construction
Ci-Jyun (Polar) Liang has dedicated his career to making construction jobs safer and more sustainable with human-robot collaboration.
After Liang graduated with his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2021, he began to work for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health as a robotics fellow. There, he conducted research related to collaborative robot safety in various workspaces and then joined Stony Brook as an assistant professor.
Liang focuses on using robots to make construction jobs safer and easier. He aims to take the back-breaking labor out of the job itself.
“I use robots to perform repetitive and physically demanding tasks on the job site like heavy lifting, assembling, and bricklaying,” said Liang. “This type of repetitive and heavy-lifting task is harmful to humans. It is very physically demanding, and instead we use the robot to do the work.”
The robots learn how to imitate construction tasks through human demonstration. A human can record a video where they demonstrate a process, such as bricklaying or ceiling tile installation, and then the robot can extract knowledge from it. The method is called imitation and reinforcement learning.
What is special about Liang’s approach is it also allows the robot to learn how to handle unforeseen situations that a demonstration may not have covered. This allows the robot to interact with the environment the way it best sees fit.
“The robot can observe the environment and provide different solutions if they didn’t see those scenarios in the human’s demonstration,” said Liang. “They can get to interact with the environment in order to find whether there is a better solution for them to do the work.”
A current obstacle is determining the most effective way for the robot to learn from the demonstrations. Videos provide one option, but a simulator is also an idea that Liang’s research team is working on. A virtual environment poses some challenges, namely what is referred to as a simulation-to-real-world-gap.
“The next phase is to try to develop an algorithm that can close this gap,” said Liang. “So the robot can perform the task, even if they were trained in the virtual environment.”
The plan is not for robots to completely replace humans in construction sites. Instead, the robots will serve as helpful assistants that are supervised by human workers.
“The human worker has valuable experiences and cognitive ability to do planning, supervising and also provide feedback to the robot when it doesn’t know what to do,” said Liang. “In this way, we can create a more safe and sustainable workplace for humans and robots to work together.”
Underground Power Line Installation Using Robotics
With his structural mechanics knowledge, Paolo Celli is creating robots that can burrow underground.
Celli’s career began in mechanical engineering, having earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in that discipline. Celli went on to specialize in solid and structural mechanics during his PhD, which he earned from a civil engineering department. His postdoc was again in mechanics, with a focus on space structures applications.
“My training is very multidisciplinary and because of that I’ve always tried to not limit myself to doing research on specific topics because they belong to specific engineering disciplines,” said Celli. “But really to think that everything is essentially a structure so I could work on anything that has a structural component to it.”
Geotechnical engineer Ali Khosravi, now a faculty member at Auburn University, works with Celli. The two received an NSF grant to research flexible structural skins. The skin that directly interacts with granular media, such as dirt or sand or gravel, is wrapped around the main base of the robot.
“Essentially, we are searching for a better understanding of the interaction between a shape morphing solid [the robot] and a granular medium,” said Celli. “We want to really understand these interactions better so that we can better design these probes that can go underground and excavate, move and explore in an automated way.”
These robots will be used for tasks such as site investigation and underground excavation, and they have further applications in other areas of engineering, such as biomedical.
More recently, Celli and his colleague found a perfect application for their fundamental research. They teamed up with a roboticist at Case Western Reserve University, Kathryn Daltorio, and received funding from ARPA-E to develop a robot that can simplify the installation of underground utility lines.
These innovations are important because weather-related power outages across the United States have escalated in recent years. Underground power lines directly combat this issue; however, current methods of installing underground power lines are slow, disruptive and expensive.
The robot his team is developing is made of a flexible body and has a drill head at its front. The robot moves via peristaltic motion, meaning a wave-like movement to push against the tunnel created by the drill, advancing in a way that is similar to how a worm moves. Celli and his Stony Brook team are responsible for designing the structural, “shape-morphing” skeleton that will allow the robot to push against the tunnel and to move peristaltically.
“Beyond robotics, these shape morphing structures we investigate can be useful as temporary structures, shelters, bridges, aerospace structures, mechanical devices or even toys,” said Celli. “They can really have many, many applications where you want the system to change more.”
Regarding the role of robotics in civil engineering as a whole, Celli said, “I don’t think robots will ever completely replace construction workers or jobs like that. I don’t think that’s possible. But there are some tasks that require some type of operation that is typically very intensive and disruptive that could be supported by robots.”
— Angelina Livigni