Real-time Construction Inspection in an Immersive Environment with an Inspector Assistant Robot

Construction project management requires frequent inspections to ensure the quality and progress of the construction work. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the inspection process during the project lifecycle. Some project stakeholders, such as architects, owners, structural engineers are involved with multiple construction projects at a time and are responsible to conduct timely inspection and monitoring tasks. This paper studies the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) and robotics for real-time remote inspection. The benefits and challenges of using VR for construction inspection and monitoring were identified and ranked through a systematic literature review. The top 5 benefits were found to be enhanced collaboration, realistic and immersive visualization, remote presence, reduction in inspection time, and support for decision-making. The top 5 challenges identified in this study include low- resolution displays, limited integration with existing technologies (such as BIM), causing disorientation and dizziness for the user, cost of adoption, and job site internet access limitations. Finally, a new approach was investigated for using VR to enable an immersive experience in remote inspection with an inspector assistant robot for real-time remote construction inspection. The experimental investigation verified the identified benefits and challenges.