PUBLICATIONS

PictoBot: A Cooperative Painting Robot for Interior Finishing of Industrial Developments
May 16, 2018
ABSTRACT: The robotic painter called Pictobot (pictor means painter in Latin) could work safely in close proximity to human coworkers performing the repetitious and troublesome task of painting at high elevations. Pictobot provides a way to combine the benefits of automation in construction with those of human dexterity and ingenuity. Thus, it relieves workers of the tiresome tasks and considerable climbing, bending, kneeling, and reaching, freeing them to supervise the robot.

QuicaBot: Quality Inspection and Assessment Robot
June 25, 2018
ABSTRACT: Quality assessment during postconstruction of buildings is an indispensable procedure in construction industry. This paper describes the design and development of a quality inspection and assessment robot (QuicaBot) that can autonomously scan the entire room using cameras and laser scanners to pick up building defects, such as hollowness, crack, evenness, alignments, and inclination.

A Novel Building Post-Construction Quality Assessment Robot: Design and Prototyping
September 23, 2017
This paper describes the design and development of an automated construction quality assessment robot system (QuicaBot) for hollowness, crack, evenness, alignments and inclination problems. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to pave the way towards a fully autonomous robotic system for post construction quality assessment of buildings. The main goal of the novel robot is twofold: to systematize the manual inspection work through automation resulting in more reliable and objective inspection reports, and to speed up the inspection process resulting in a cost reduction. Based-on our initial on-site tests, the developed robot increases the overall efficiency in all the aforementioned five problems.

Automatic Robot Taping with Force Feedback
May 28, 2017
Abstract: In surface treatment processes like plasma spraying and spray painting of workpieces, protecting the uninvolved surface by applying masking tape is a common process. Due to the operation complexity for different geometries, such taping tasks depend on a lot of manual works, which is tedious and tiring. This paper introduces an automatic agile robotic system and the corresponding algorithm to do the surface taping. The automatic taping system consists of a 3D scanner for workpiece 3D model reconstruction, a taping end-effector which is mounted on a robot manipulator to handle the taping task, and a rotating platform that is used to hold the workpiece. The surface covering method and the taping path planning algorithms using the scanned model are introduced. With the implementation of the compliance mechanism, the force feedback and the tape cutting mechanism, the system is able to tape flat, cylindrical, freeform, and grooved surfaces. Experiments conducted on taping an engine inner liner shows that the surface can be covered with uniform taping overlap and very little wrinkle. The proposed system is a useful taping package for industrial applications such as workpiece repairing and surface protection, where surface treatments are involved.

An Agile Robot Taping System – modeling, tool design, planning and execution
September 20, 2016
Industrial Robot: An International Journal
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1108/IR-01-2016-0018