Advancements in AI and Their Applications in Infrastructure Engineering: Research at the AIP Infrastructure Management Robotics Technology Team

Abstract

Since 2016, the Infrastructure Management Robotics Technology Team at RIKEN has been engaged in research on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to infrastructure maintenance and management. Over this period, AI has undergone remarkable advancements, particularly with the emergence of deep learning and foundation models. Foundation models are large-scale neural networks pretrained on vast amounts of web data, characterized by their high generalization capability and ability to be adapted to specific tasks post-training. At the core of these models are large language models (LLMs), which predict subsequent words based on the contextual understanding of given text. Recently, a paradigm shift has been observed toward reasoning models that generate responses through step-by-step logical inference. As AI systems continue to improve, they have demonstrated the ability to acquire a significant portion of the explicit knowledge articulated by humans and made publicly available online. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art multimodal AI systems remain limited in their ability to handle tacit knowledge, embodied cognition, and intuition—forms of knowledge that are inherently difficult to verbalize—highlighting key challenges that must be addressed in future research.