Environment-Aware Worker Trajectory Prediction Using Surveillance Camera in Modular Construction Facilities

Abstract

The safety of workers in modular construction remains a concern due to the dynamic hazardous work environments and unawareness of the potential proximity of equipment. To avoid potential contact collisions and to provide a safe workplace, workers’ trajectory prediction is required. With recent technology advancements, the study in the area of trajectory prediction has benefited from various data-driven approaches. However, existing data-driven approaches are mostly limited to considering only the movement information of workers in the workplace, resulting in poor estimation accuracy. In this study, we propose an environment-aware worker trajectory prediction framework based on long short-term memory (LSTM) network to not only take the individual movement into account but also the surrounding information to fully exploit the context in the modular construction facilities. By incorporating worker-to-worker interactions as well as environment-to-worker interactions into our prediction model, a sequence of the worker’s future positions can be predicted. Extensive numerical tests on synthetic as well as modular construction datasets show the improved prediction performance of the proposed approach in comparison to several state-of-the-art alternatives. This study offers a systematic and flexible framework to incorporate rich contextual information into the prediction model in modular construction. The observation of how to integrate construction data analytics into a single framework could be inspiring for further future research to support robust construction safety practices.