Florida International University (FIU) has been awarded a grant to develop games that can train individuals for roles in architecture, engineering, and construction. The funding, awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), will support FIU’s exploration into how institutions can train skilled workers at a time when robotics and autonomous systems are increasingly being deployed in the AEC sector.

As part of the project, faculty from the institution’s School of Architecture and School of Computing and Information Services will work together to develop a platform that will use virtual reality games to train workers through a personalized learning program. The learning tool is expected to focus on operational industrial robots, with learning delivery tailored for "differences in ability, experience, and sociocultural backgrounds."

The tool will see users asked to explain their decisions as they perform tasks in the virtual system, with AI software tracking their language to determine the extent of their understanding. The tool will use this data to subsequently recommend specific lessons to the user. For example, if a participant is struggling with how to use a robot’s pivot points to reach an object, the system will examine the words and actions of the user to provide the most effective lesson for improvement.

“This method is similar to how teachers and professors grade essay questions,” the project’s co-principal Mark Finlayson explained. “This project will help us drive forward an area of critical importance, namely, the application of AI and Natural Language Processing technologies to the analysis of learning data. This kind of work will be an important step in understanding how to bring AI benefits to education research and give education researchers a model to follow in the use of cutting-edge NLP analyses.”

FIU researchers Shahin Vassigh (principal investigator), Mark Finlayson (co-principal investigator), Professor Biayna Bogosian (co-principal investigator), teaching professor Eric Peterson along with RDF lab researcher Madeline Gannon, will collaborate with learning scientist Seth Corrigan from the University of California-Irvine, and Shu-Ching Chen, data scientist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and former FIU professor, to develop the advanced virtual reality training platform. 

News of the funding comes one week after a Pennsylvania company launched an autonomous construction robot to reduce rebar installation times, while a San Francisco company announced the development of the “world’s first fully autonomous solar piling system.” Last month, meanwhile, Boston Dynamics released a new video of their humanoid robot Atlas assisting on a mock construction site.