A Construction Robot for Autonomous Plastering of Walls and Ceilings

Abstract

A Construction Robot for Autonomous Plastering of Walls and Ceilings Johan Forsberg, Roger Aarenstrup, Åke Wernersson Pages 260-268 (1997 Proceedings of the 14th ISARC, Pittsburgh, USA, ISSN 2413-5844) Abstract: The problem addressed is plastering of walls and ceilings during the construction of apartment and office buildings. The concrete wallls are to be covered by a smooth layer of plaster, a few millimeters thick. The workplace is structured enough that map generation, navigation and motion planning can be performed autonomously. The robot must reliably avoid plastering windows and doors. Typical requirements on the navigation requirements are standard deviations no greater than 1 cm. Two prototypes are described. For navigation the robot uses a range measuring sensors scanning in one (or two) planes. The observations are used to create and continuosly update, a mainly planar map with some vertical information - i.e. door and windows positions. The map generation and sensor fusion algorithms are based on a Bayesian association algorithm and an extended Kalman filter. Tests have been successfully performed at an actual construction site. The time used for plastering the walls and ceiling in a room is expected to be less than 50% of that required by manual work. The amount of plaster used is also greatly reduced due to more even spraying. However, the reasons for developing the robot is mainly ergonomic. Keywords: No keywords DOI: https://doi.org/10.22260/ISARC1997/0032 Download fulltext Download BibTex Download Endnote (RIS) TeX Import to Mendeley