Papers for

facility maintenance teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Construction safety reporting improved by conversational ai system

CARES: A Conversational AI System for Regulation-Grounded Safety Reporting in Construction Education

Abstract: Construction safety reporting often relies on manual logs and static templates that provide limited feedback and leave daily activities disconnected from relevant regulations. This paper introduces CARES (Conversational AI Reporting for Enhanced Safety), a conversational AI system that integrates regulatory guidance into daily reporting to support construction safety education. CARES combines proactive multi-agent dialogue, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and automated report generation. The system guides users through reporting tasks, retrieves relevant regulatory passages using hybrid retrieval, and converts conversations into structured daily reports. Regulatory sources and the evolving report are displayed alongside the dialogue to support user review and correction. A preliminary evaluation involving 15 construction management students assessed retrieval quality, response faithfulness, and conversational relevance. CARES achieved an overall faithfulness score of 0.74 and an answer relevance score of 1.00, while initial retrieval ranking remained an area for improvement. These results provide preliminary evidence of the technical feasibility of regulation-grounded conversational reporting. The study highlights opportunities to integrate regulatory knowledge into routine documentation, with future work needed to evaluate effects on report quality, safety awareness, and learning outcomes.

Wed 16 SeptHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Safety reports at construction sites often miss important rules because they rely on manual entries or fixed forms. The authors created CARES, a new chatbot that helps people write safety reports while showing the relevant safety rules. CARES uses smart techniques to find these rules and turns conversations into organized reports that users can review and fix. Early tests with students showed the system is pretty accurate and useful, although some parts that find information can be better. This study suggests chatbots could help people learn and follow safety rules better in construction work.
Open → 2609.19429v1

EcoBoat cleans pools and lakes using simple sensors and design

EcoBoat: Design and Experimental Validation of an Autonomous Body-Board Boat For Cleaning Water Bodies

Abstract: Cleaning water bodies such as swimming pools and lakes typically demands significant manual effort or reliance on costly, sensor-intensive robotic systems. This paper presents EcoBoat, a low-cost autonomous surface vehicle built on a modified hull, designed to collect floating debris in both indoor and outdoor water bodies. For indoor environments, EcoBoat uses ultrasonic sensors to detect boundaries and obstacles, combining random-walk motion with boundary-following behavior. For outdoor environments, it relies on GPS-based geofencing paired with a random-walk strategy for area coverage. A key design feature is a Tesla-valve-inspired collection basket that allows debris intake during forward motion while preventing its escape during turning or braking. Field experiments in pools and lakes validated the design through iterative refinement, demonstrating that a minimalist sensing and computation approach can achieve effective, versatile debris collection across diverse water bodies.

Sun 13 SeptRobotics
The gist
Cleaning floating trash from water like pools or lakes usually needs either a lot of human work or expensive robots with many sensors. The authors created EcoBoat, a small, low-cost boat that cleans water surfaces by moving around on its own. It uses simple sensors indoors to detect walls and obstacles and GPS outdoors to stay within a certain area. Its special basket design helps catch trash when moving forward but keeps it from falling out when turning or stopping. Tests in real pools and lakes showed that this simple approach works well for collecting debris.
Open → 2609.14450v1