From Documented Strengths to Force Limits: Material-Informed Robotic Insertion for Construction Assembly

Abstract

Insertion is a fundamental operation in robotic construction assembly, where variations in material properties and assembly conditions make it difficult to select contact forces that complete the task without exceeding the assembly's capacity. Although construction documents encode engineering knowledge about materials and their conditions, translating this knowledge into load limits for a specific assembly remains difficult. This paper presents SAGE (Source-grounded Assembly Gating and Execution), a system that converts documented material evidence into capacity estimates for robotic insertion. SAGE restricts a large language model (LLM) to extracting tensile and compressive strengths from retrieved passages and tables and records their sources. A response model then interpolates offline finite element (FE) solutions to convert these strengths and the assembly conditions into axial load capacity. For fits with positive clearance, the estimated capacity sets the policy's axial force limit; for interference fits, it is compared with measured support demand to determine admission. On the primary benchmark, SAGE reduces mean capacity error from 80.65\% for direct LLM estimates based on the same evidence to 10.74\%. Without refitting, the mean error remains 8.00\% on 16 additional geometries. Under the assigned support release model, SAGE correctly classifies 59 of 62 scored simulation runs, with only conservative errors. In recorded xArm6 demonstrations, SAGE takes material documents as input and completes physical insertion in 9 of 13 trials. These results show that assigning document interpretation to the LLM and force calculation to an explicit mechanical model produces accurate capacity estimates and traceable insertion decisions.