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Trends in Robotics and Automation
in Construction
Carlos Balaguer and Mohamed Abderrahim
University Carlos III of Madrid
Spain 1. Introduction
Until very recently, the construction industry was one of the most unfamiliar R&D fields for the robotics and automation community, despite the fact that this industry is one of the oldest and reprents the largest economic ctors. The construction industry’s contribution to the GDP in industrialized countries is about 7-10%. In the US this contribution ris to 12% and in the EU there are about 2.7 M enterpris (most of them Small and Medium Enterpris) involved in the business. This figure is comparable to that of the manufacturing industry. However, the investment in R&D is the double in the ca of manufacturing.
雷查尔斯
蓝宝石晶体The technological level of the construction industry during the old ages was very high for their historical period. The old civilizations have built very long lasting structures like pyramids, acropolis, aqueducts, cathedrals, etc. They ud innovative process and elements for their contemporary normal building procedures. Nevertheless, some of nowadays construction process have changed little. For example, the building erection process has changed very little over the past eight hundred years. The old ages pulleys are substituted by cranes. The are more sophisticated than centuries ago, but they work with the same principles: manual control, human operator visual feedback, big positioning error, etc. The only elements that have change are: electrical or diel actuators replaced the human force and steel structures replaced the wooden elements. The two advances allowed increasing the elevation speed, the payload and reachability, but the construction philosophy itlf has changed little.
In recent years, the construction industry has become one of the most important rearch areas in the field of rvice robotics. The main difficulty of Robotics and Automation in Construction (RAC) is related to the nature of the work environment, which is highly unstructured in general. Working in this environment involves handling heavy objects, elements made with big tolerances, low level of standardization, medium level of industrialization and pre-fabrication, in addition to the intervention o
f numerous non-coordinated actors (architects, builders, suppliers, etc.). Therefore, a big effort needs to be made to increa the level of automation of this important ctor and to coordinate more the involved process in order to improve its productivity.
During the 90s the R&D activities in the field of RAC were lead by Japane companies and universities, and were focud on the development of new robotic systems (most of them teleoperated) and in the automation of existing machinery. This era of the RAC rearch is
called hard robotics (Balaguer, 2003). The robots tried to automate veral construction process in the hou building and the civil construction. The robots were for interior building finishing, brick layer masonry, modular industrialized building’s construction, road paver’s nsor-bad guidance, excavator’s control, infrastructure inspection, tunnel and bridge construction among others. The “bubble economy” crisis en Japan among other factors such as the unsatisfied over-expectation of the RAC strongly reduced investment in rearch activities during the last few years. Only few construction robots had succeeded to make their way to the market. Nevertheless, the situation is changing now and new RAC rearch trends have been launched. The actual R&D activities are centring more in the software and IT technologies. This is not limited to software only but also include hardware, but not in the machinery n. It includes on-site nsory data acquisition and pr
ocessing, human operator’s field safety and curity, chip-bad process control and monitoring, automated inventory and shop keeping among many others.
The rest of this chapter prents a comparison between the construction and the car manufacturing industry and discuss some of the issues that limit more technological advances and higher levels of automation in the construction ctor. The following ctions are dedicated to prent and discuss some examples of the state of the art in robotics and automations technologies in construction. The following ction discuss some aspects that affect higher implementation of robotics and automation in construction, and the last ction prents the conclusions.
修改开机启动项>龟裂3. Comparison between the construction and the automobile industries
As mentioned briefly in the previous ctions, the construction industry has already en the introduction of automated and mi automated means in the production of construction elements. The transition from totally manual process to nowadays mi-automated system permits to increa the productivity. Nevertheless, the advance in construction industry is not comparable to advances in other industries such as manufacturing and especially in the ctors of automobile, electronics, train, aircraft, etc. The car prices, the number of different models and variations, and the concept of mass production make the automobile industry much clo to construction than the others.
One of the key factors of any industry’s success evaluation is its productivity. Fig. 1 shows the comparison of the construction and automobile industries in the EU. This figure clearly demonstrates that the automobile industry productivity has incread veral times more than that of the construction during the last decade. The main reason in this high productivity is the modern manufacturing concept: Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM). This concept was developed during the last two decades and has changed not only the manufacturing process itlf but the concept of the product (Rembold et al., 1993), (Rehg, 1994). The CIM systems permit to balance the flexibility in the product with the manufacturing productivity. This relationship is one of the key factors of the success of the automobile industry.
While the hou-building construction industry continue to be very clo to craft work, constructing mostly singular buildings, the automobile industry continuously ek to reduce the cost of product development. This permits also to reduce the cost of the final product. The so called platform concept of the actual automobile industry is one of the newest advances of the CIM system. It is bad on the u of a number of elements in various models. The same platform design, engine, electronics, etc. are ud not only in different
models of cars of the same company but also in the cars of other companies. This concept reduces
a vehicle cost and makes the automobile companies more competitive.携程旅行网
The high level of integration in all the production stages permits to start from the design process taking in mind the manufacturing and market aspects. The platform concept and integration lead to the high level of robotization and automation in automobile industry. In some of the EU plants the level of automation (the number of non-manually made operations respect to the total number of operations) is more than 60%. Mass production brings down the cost not only of the end product (in this ca, the cars) but also the cost of manufacturing equipment (robots, machine tools, etc.). This is why during the last decade industrial robot prices in the EU have decread and their number has incread (Fig. 2).
Fig. 1. Productivity of the construction and automobile industries in EU (sources: Euroconstruct, Eurostat, ACEA)
Fig. 2. Number of industrial robots (IR) in EU and its price in US$ (source: IFR)
Robotics in manufacturing industry is an evolution while the robotics in construction industry is the not yet finished revolution. While the number of industrial robots is counted in hundreds of thousands the number of robots in the construction industry is counted in hundreds only. Important efforts have been made to adapt the CIM concept to the construction industry created the Computer Integrated Construction (CIC) (Miyatake & Kangari, 1993) (Balaguer et al. 2002). Unfortunately, this effort has better results only in the
IT related stages of the construction process (planning, suppliers’ relationship, etc.) but not as good results in the production stages (pre-fabrication technology, building erection, masonry, on-site automation, etc.). Despite the recent development in RAC, the gap between the technological levels of both industries is still very high
The CIM concept permits to reduce not only the cost of manufacturing but also changes the corporate culture (Kangarii, 1996). It is easier to introduce the new technologies in automobile industry than in the construction. In general, the construction industry continues to be very conrvative. In many cas when the new automatic products are not complementary to the old ones, they are hardly implemented and their u is kept to minimum. Moreover, if the products introduce inconveniences to the whole construction cycle, they are openly refud. To the contrary, in the manufacturing industry the people and the environment respond very positively to technological innovation. Rearchers and end urs speak the same “language” and share the same objective, which allows introducing the new technologies very quickly.
According to ACEA, in 1999 the EU automobile industry investments in R&D were over 5% of the turnover while the construction industry investments in hou-building technology were less than 3% (Euroconstruct, 1998). In the construction industry the big companies tend to limit their capacity to in
vest in “tomorrow’s construction robots” from which return on investment is uncertain and too far in the future. This is also the ca of the big construction machines companies, which tend to invest more in civil engineering equipments than in development of equipments dedicated for hou-building.
2. State of the art in construction robotics
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The main rearch activities of the RAC in the past decade were divided accordingly to applications into two large groups: civil infrastructure and hou building. Typical civil infrastructure robot applications are the automation of road, tunnel and bridge construction, earthwork, etc. In the group of hou construction, main applications include building skeleton erection and asmbly, concrete compaction, interior finishing, etc. Classification according to applications is consistent with other possible classifications, which divide RAC R&D activities according to the development of new equipment and process or the adaptation of existing machinery to transform them into robotic system.
In this ction veral examples of robotics systems are prented. In the group of civil infrastructure the examples are road pavers’ nsor-bad guidance, earthmoving control and infrastructure inspe
ction. In the group of housing the examples are interior building finishing, brick layer masonry, column welding, modular industrialized building’s construction.
2.1 Civil infrastructures
In the field of road construction, veral projects had been developed over the last decade. They were mainly focud in the development of the new generation of mi-autonomous road pavers and asphalt compactors. The EU projects CIRC (Peyret et al., 2003) and latter OSYRIS (www.osyris) had as the main objectives, bad in the GPS and lar data, the mi-autonomous guidance of the machines and the quality control of pavers and roller process by controlling the speed, temperature, layer thickness, travelled distance, etc. (Fig.
3). The coordination of veral machines in order to improve productivity is also the objective of the project.
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Fig. 3. OSYRIS project nsor-bad compactor
In the field of earthwork the rearch is centred in the introduction of new control techniques to existing machinery like excavators, bulldozers, draglines, etc. One of the major exponents of this rearch area is the control by CSIRO of the 100-m tall walking crane ud in surface coal mining (Corke et al., 2006). The swing cycle of the dragline accounts for about 80 percent of time taken. The automatic swing cycle improves the efficiency of the machine, taking in mind that the bucket which weighs around 40 tonnes when empty and up to 120 tonnes when full, acts as a large pendulum and requires operator skill to control well (Fig.
4). The torque-force control during the excavation is also improving the productivity of the process. The University of Sydney project (Ha et al., 2000) developed an automated excavator that accounts for interaction forces in analysing the required bucket motion therefore ems promising. As the bucket comes in contact with its environment, the contact force must be regulated such that it remains within a specific range by using specific control
strategy (Fig. 5).
Fig. 4. CSIRO’s dragline project
Fig. 5. the Automated excavator of the University of Sidney
The periodic inspection and maintenance of the civil infrastructures was another important rearch activity. The inspection of building skeletons, complex roofs, off-shore platforms, bridges, etc. reprents an extensive and valuable field of work. It is estimated that in the EU there are over 42.000 steel bridges with a replacement cost of 350 M€. The ROMA family climbing robots (Balaguer et al., 2000) able to travel in a complex 3D environment carry out veral inspection nsors (lar telemeters, colour cameras) in order to transmit the field data to the “ground” system (Fig. 6). The key issue of the robots is the grasping method
(grippers, electromagnets, suction cups, etc.).
Fig. 6. ROMA climbing inspection robot
2.2 Hou building推算预产期的方法
Interior-finishing operations in the building are very time consuming and requires high degree of accuracy. There are veral mobile manipulators able to perform variety of operations like extend, compact and control the thickness of the floor concrete, painting and steel column fire protection spraying, asmbly of interior walls and ceilings, etc. Most of
the robots are teloperated and perform only simple operations. The most reprentatives’
