Construction Robots

Construction Robotics 　 This is age of robotics and new research is going in this field. Right now the main and foremost use of robotics is in the field of industries. Presently we categories robots in the various forms like humanoid robots, palletizing robots, welding robots, paint robots, battle bots and many more. But construction robots are not yet categorized until now. These types of robots will shape the future but research is still going on in this field and it will take some time to develop and use them in real world. The basic question arises is how these robot will look alike. It could look like humanoids, industrial robots or like caterpillars. But it doesn’t matter how they will look alike as long as they are going to construct efficiently. Lets just take a simple robot which could look alike as below shown fig :

Theta axis

Alpha axis

Z axis Hand to perform work

R axis

Set of sensors

Wall to constructed

be

In the fig we can see a robot having 4 axis constructing a wall with the help of its hand. The necessary things which a robot will need are hand, vision camera or set of sensors. As we have considered it as a simple 4 axis robot lets discuss more about it. About 4 axis: 1 axis – Lets call it Z axis - This axis is responsible for the movement of robot up and down 2 axis – Lets call it R axis – This axis is responsible for the movement of robot front and back 3 axis – Lets call it theta axis – This axis is responsible for the movement for robot along its base. 4 axis – let’s call it alpha axis – this axis is responsible for the movement for the robot hand to move in angle. All these four axis will work together with the help of vision camera installed on the robot hand or in some different place to monitor the progress and guiding robot to finish uncompleted business. So now the question arises, what is vision camera technology? “Unlike the traditional robot calibration methods, which need external expensive calibration apparatus and elaborate setups to measure the 3D feature points in the reference frame, a vision-based self-calibration method for a serial robot manipulator, which only requires a ground-truth scale in the reference frame, is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm assumes that the camera is rigidly attached to the robot end-effector (robot hand), which makes it possible to obtain the pose of the manipulator with the pose of the camera. By designing a manipulator movement trajectory, the camera poses can be estimated up to a scale factor at each configuration with the factorization method, where a nonlinear least-square algorithm is applied to improve its robustness. An efficient approach is proposed to estimate this scale factor. The great advantage of this self-calibration method is that only image sequences of a calibration object and a ground-truth length are needed, which makes the robot calibration procedure more autonomous in a dynamic manufacturing environment.” This vision technology is in use at present in various industrial applications where robot does its work by looking it object by its camera. Vision is necessary part for each and every robot. Either robot could use direct vision with the help of vision technology or can use sensors to guide it.

Working of robot: So the thing is how the robot will work. Robot always works according to set of algorithms written. There are 2 parts in that, First there is system program which is usually same always and runs in background and other part is robot actual program. Robot always run according to this program and identifies its coordinates to move. This program is written according set of conditions and always keeps changing. 　 The program works by getting signals for sensors and do its job. In case of construction robot we have to define certain parameters to the robot before robot start commencing its work.　 Let us suppose we want to construct a simple wall so we would need these parameters: Height of wall Length of wall Width of wall Length of brick Height of brick Width of brick Weight of brick Starting point Ending point Extra points Once these parameters are defined robot could create a simple wall of particular dimension. The starting point and ending points can be feed to robot manually or robot would determine the points in 3-D space by its vision camera and parameters uploaded to it. Once all these parameters are uploaded robot will just pick and place bricks along with holding material with it. As this operation is repetitive operation it is easy to do by robot and it will take 1/50 th time of the human. Right now robots can do such type of operation of picking and placing at a speed of 1600 cycles / hr (when the product weight is around 30 kgs and hand weight is around 60 kgs ). So if we consider robot as picking up 5 bricks at a time robot would place around 6000 bricks / hr. 　 This is the calculation done for our simple robot fixed base industrial type robot.

Starting point　　　　　　　　　Extra point 　

End point

　

End Effector

We suppose beginning of construction robot will begin for industrial robots with fixed base, then moving base and then later it would be handled by humanoids which are still in research labs. We have to wait at least 25 years for the humanoids.