Artificial Intelligence in Human–Robot Collaboration in the Construction Industry: A Scoping Review

Bo Peng; Maxwell Fordjour Antwi-Afari; Bilal Manzoor; Evans Boateng; Emmanuel Nyamekye Antwi Afari; Zezhou Wu

doi:10.3390/buildings15173060

Artificial Intelligence in Human–Robot Collaboration in the Construction Industry: A Scoping Review

Bo Peng, Maxwell Fordjour Antwi-Afari, Bilal Manzoor, Evans Boateng, Emmanuel Nyamekye Antwi Afari, Zezhou Wu

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Abstract

With the gradual rise of automation and human–robot collaboration (HRC), artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to significantly change the construction industry by automating design and decision-making processes, thus improving both productivity and safety. Despite the growing research trends in AI and HRC, no study has synthesized the existing studies of AI in HRC in the construction industry. This paper aims to conduct a review of AI in HRC in construction and summarize the current mainstream topics, research gaps, and future research directions. A scoping review and science mapping analysis were used to explore extant literature in the studied domain and conduct keyword co-occurrence analysis, respectively. In this study, 210 relevant articles were retrieved from the Scopus database from 1993 to July 2025. The results revealed five main clusters regarding the co-occurrence of keywords. Four mainstream research topics were discussed, including (1) AI techniques and applications, (2) the use of extended reality (XR) in HRC, (3) the challenges of HRC, and (4) the application of HRC in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. Moreover, this study provided a detailed summary of research gaps and future research directions. These findings offer researchers and practitioners a deeper understanding of AI applications in HRC for construction case studies and serve as actionable directions to advance this field.

Original language	English
Article number	3060
Number of pages	25
Journal	Buildings
Volume	15
Issue number	17
Early online date	27 Aug 2025
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15173060
Publication status	Published - Sept 2025

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Funding

The authors are grateful to the Department of Civil Engineering, Aston University, UK, for supporting this research. The authors are also grateful to the Editor and reviewers for their comments to improve the quality of this paper. This paper forms part of the first author\u2019s research project where similar research backgrounds but different scopes and/or analyses may have been published.

Keywords

artificial intelligence
construction industry
human–robot collaboration
scientometric analysis
scoping review

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10.3390/buildings15173060Licence: CC BY 4.0

Artificial Intelligence in Human–Robot Collaboration in the Construction Industry - A Scoping Review
Copyright © 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Final published version, 1.9 MBLicence: CC BY 4.0

Cite this

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abstract = "With the gradual rise of automation and human–robot collaboration (HRC), artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to significantly change the construction industry by automating design and decision-making processes, thus improving both productivity and safety. Despite the growing research trends in AI and HRC, no study has synthesized the existing studies of AI in HRC in the construction industry. This paper aims to conduct a review of AI in HRC in construction and summarize the current mainstream topics, research gaps, and future research directions. A scoping review and science mapping analysis were used to explore extant literature in the studied domain and conduct keyword co-occurrence analysis, respectively. In this study, 210 relevant articles were retrieved from the Scopus database from 1993 to July 2025. The results revealed five main clusters regarding the co-occurrence of keywords. Four mainstream research topics were discussed, including (1) AI techniques and applications, (2) the use of extended reality (XR) in HRC, (3) the challenges of HRC, and (4) the application of HRC in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. Moreover, this study provided a detailed summary of research gaps and future research directions. These findings offer researchers and practitioners a deeper understanding of AI applications in HRC for construction case studies and serve as actionable directions to advance this field.",

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Artificial Intelligence in Human–Robot Collaboration in the Construction Industry: A Scoping Review

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