BIM for the Steel Fabrication Industry Robotic Systems

In this paper we present a comparison between the older DSTV file format and the newer version of the IFC standard, dedicating special attention of its impact in the robotization of welding and cutting processes in the construction industry. In the last decade, we have seen a significant increase in the request for automation in the steel fabrication industry. These new requirements are imposed by a market focused on the productivity enhancement through automation. Because of this paradigm change, the information structure and workflow provided by the DSTV format needed to be revised, namely the one related with the plan and management of steel fabrication processes. Therefore, with this work we enhance the importance of the increased digitalization of information that the newer version of the IFC standard provide, by showing how this information can be used to develop advanced robotic cells. More in detail, we will focus on the automatic generation of robot welding and cutting trajectories, and in the automatic part assembly planning during components fabrications. Besides these advantages, as this information is normally described having as base a CAD model of the metallic structure, the resultant robot trajectories will have some dimensional error when fitted with the real physical component. Hence, we also present examples of use case problems that result from these limitations, proposing automatic approaches based on a laser scanner sensor and simple heuristics to solve them.