Development of a Manually Operated Mobile Robot That Prints Construction Site Layouts

Chalk lines are used to print layouts in construction sites to indicate the location of attaching or cutting objects; printing depends on the skills of workers and is suitable for small-scale work. Moreover, this type of work requires a precise measurement process, which is time-consuming, to avoid...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMachines (Basel) Vol. 10; no. 12; p. 1192
Main Authors Lee, An Yong, Seo, Hee Chang, Park, Eun Soo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2022
Subjects
Automation
Concrete floors
Construction
Construction management
construction site
Construction sites
Control systems
Controllers
Design
Experiments
Lasers
layout printing
Layouts
manual operation
Marking
mecanum wheel
mobile robot
Optimization
Printing
Robots
Toolkits
South Korea
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Summary:Chalk lines are used to print layouts in construction sites to indicate the location of attaching or cutting objects; printing depends on the skills of workers and is suitable for small-scale work. Moreover, this type of work requires a precise measurement process, which is time-consuming, to avoid errors. Thus, discrepancies between blueprints and construction site layouts can occur if construction plans and management are not uniformly aligned. To improve the traditional floor-layout-printing technique on construction sites, this study introduces a manually operated mecanum-wheeled mobile robot in the preliminary stage, i.e., before the development of a full-fledged automated system. This manually operated robot helps determine the technologies required for robotic automation. In the development process, layout-printing technology is classified into a marking toolkit, control system that can be manually operated, and mobile driver. To improve layout-printing quality, this study adopted a mecanum-wheeled design to improve mobility. In this study, applied tests are required to consider the site environment for automatically marking floor layout prints. To determine the applicability of the developed technology, this study conducted a field applicability experiment with a pen-type marking module and laser-type toolkit. The experiment confirmed that layout printing based on environmental changes on the construction site can be manually performed using the mobile robot system. To automatically mark floor-layout-printing work, it is necessary to consider the floor characteristics on the construction site. In addition, this experiment shows that the newly applied laser toolkit technology can be applied to layout printing within 12 mm from the floor. To apply this mechanism to a mobile robot that can automate layout printing, it is necessary to technically enhance the optimization of marking quality, e.g., floor separation distance and marking thickness.
ISSN:2075-1702
2075-1702
DOI:10.3390/machines10121192