This study addresses an off-site construction (OSC) task: installing heavy prefabricated equipment modules at elevated positions inside existing structures. The task simultaneously demands multi-ton payload capacity, a lift height approaching 10 m, and holonomic maneuvering in narrow aisles; to the authors’ knowledge, no single reported platform satisfies all three. We present a heavy-duty, high-lift mobile robot that lifts 6 t to 8 m. Two active swerve-drive modules and three passive casters form a five-point asymmetric layout combining holonomic mobility with load distribution, and the lift unit functionally decouples the vertical stroke (four helical band actuators) from the lateral stiffness (four scissor-stabilizing mechanisms). Planar motion is partitioned into three driving modes with closed-form forward and inverse kinematics, and zero-velocity transitions remove the kinematic model mismatch and the instantaneous-center-of-rotation discontinuity of a single unified model. Prototype measurements confirmed the motor-sizing torque assumptions, and chassis finite element analysis showed a factor of safety above 2.0 under maximum payload and quantified the in-plane stress induced by kinematic mismatch. In two field deployments, the robot reduced personnel by 25.0–27.3%, equipment by 42.9–60.0%, and installation duration by 50.0–85.7% relative to the incumbent methods, thereby extending mobile robots from horizontal transport to vertical OSC module installation.

Indoor service and inspection robots need environment knowledge that is queryable, reliable, and maintainable as the site changes, yet open-vocabulary 3D pipelines propagate unverified labels downstream and build-once scene models offer no maintenance path. We present TLS-SMF, a semantic modeling framework that converts registered terrestrial laser scans into a confidence-aware semantic knowledge graph and keeps it current across repeated scans. TLS-SMF combines (i) a deterministic geometric backbone whose re-runs are byte-identical on the same host, (ii) multi-view vision–language-model verification with automatic escalation that retains unresolved objects as explicitly unverified, and (iii) identity-preserving incremental updates that apply confidence-gated node-level upserts to mint-once node identities. Across two operational configurations of one industrial room, escalation lifts verification accuracy from 77.8% to 88.9% and from 78.1% to 84.4%, with 94.4–100% unanimous-vote precision against confirmed owner ground truth; on the showroom benchmark, structurally gated querying answers 83.3% of questions versus 52.1% for an unverified Stage-A LLM baseline while blocking hallucination traps; in a controlled same-quality combined-edit re-scan, selective re-verification reduces VLM cost to 3.1% of a full rebuild; and a real three-epoch study detects 2/2 controlled physical changes with zero observed identity switches on strong reference correspondences, while re-segmentation still produces false-new/false-absent cases. A cross-floor cafeteria stress scene bounds domain transfer, and an owner-in-the-loop revision path keeps the single semantic store corrigible for robot-facing use; the same store drives a physical mobile manipulator, which completes three console-issued semantic missions with a mean arrival error of 0.30 m while phantom goals are refused with zero motion.

Automated three-dimensional (3D) mapping with a survey-grade terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) is the canonical instance of robotic stop-and-scan light detection and ranging (LiDAR) mapping: the mobile platform must remain stationary for minutes per scan, so the environment must be covered with as few scans as possible. Where to stop hinges on a coverage model predicting what a scan pose will observe. The conventional isotropic-disk model counts every free cell within sensing range as covered—including cells behind walls—and, therefore, skips scans that genuine observation requires. We replace the disk with a ray-cast visibility region computed on the robot’s live two-dimensional (2D) occupancy map, admitting only cells in direct line of sight; define a line-of-sight (LOS) coverage metric over mapped free space and drive a marginal-gain scan/skip rule embedded in frontier exploration. The planner thus performs 2D scan-station placement for subsequent 3D mapping. In a controlled paired ablation in simulation, the visibility rule raises LOS coverage from about 77% to 84–85% for one to two additional scans, and it also outperforms a disk baseline governed by the identical marginal-gain rule, isolating the coverage model itself as the decisive factor. In a fully autonomous on-hardware comparison in an industrial test room, with each rule driving a mobile platform carrying a Leica BLK360 G1, the visibility rule raised LOS coverage from 77.6% to 92.1%; every visibility run’s scans registered offline at survey grade (4–5 mm bundle error, 84–88% overlap), whereas disk runs yielded at best a single-link network and once a single unregistrable scan. The results indicate that, for the room-scale indoor environments studied, occlusion-aware visibility is a sounder basis than Euclidean proximity for stop-and-scan placement.