Challenges and Opportunities in Perceiving Worker Intentions for Proactive Human–Robot Collaboration in Construction

Human–robot collaboration (HRC) has the potential to enhance safety and productivity in construction. However, much of the existing HRC development relies on passive or reactive paradigms, placing imbalanced cognitive workloads on humans and hindering smooth and efficient collaboration. Addressing these issues requires robots to be active in collaboration, perceiving worker intentions and responding to human needs to enhance team fluency and efficiency, i.e., proactive HRC. Existing HRC reviews have explored general robot programming methods and human–robot interfaces. However, there is a lack of a holistic understanding of worker intention, which is a critical prerequisite for facilitating proactive HRC. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a systematic review of existing worker intention perception studies by defining the concept, identifying key cues that convey worker intentions, and exploring various levels of intention prediction methods. Challenges and future directions are discussed, with the hope of offering valuable insights into proactive HRC in construction.