CU-brick cable-driven robot for automated construction of complex brick structures: From simulation to hardware realisation

Abstract

Robotic building construction has had significant advances in the recent decades, but also has various limitations. In particular, construction typically requires a robot to operate within a large space for long hours and be able to transport between sites. Cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) show strong potentials within the automation of construction due to its desirable characteristics, such as high payload-to-weight ratio, transportability, scalability and reconfigurability. This paper proposes a simulation-based analysis, design and pre-execution verification for a cable-driven brick structure building system (CU-Brick), among which a way to determine the buildable workspace where the construction could be constructed is proposed. Simulations are used to do the workspace analysis, design of the brick structure within the workspace and also verification that the motions can be executed. Using this simulation approach, real demonstrations have been performed to show that indeed the system is able to construct the brick structures safely and consistently.