Design and Synthesis of the Localization System for the On-site Construction Robot

Building tasks that carry out on the building façade, such as painting, cleaning, and maintenance are often to be described as dangerous, dirty, and demanding. Recently, researchers and institutes are developing autonomous and semi-autonomous On-site Construction Robots (OCR) for those aforementioned applications. The most of façade working OCR is either suspended or supported by the secondary structure. The biggest challenges for these types of methods are obtained stability while carrying out the task against external elements such as wind and inertia caused by the step motors. There are very limited resources that discuss positioning and stabilizing methods. In this paper, a novel localization system for OCR will be introduced, which is based on the on-site construction robot commissioned by The Construction Industry Council Hong Kong (CIC) and developed by the Chair of Building Realization and Robotics (br2) at Technical University of Munich (TUM). The research presents the preliminary concept of a stabilization method that can be adopted on most of the suspended OCR type. The proposed system will localize the initial position, alter the OCR into the correct working pose, and secure the system to place. At the time of this writing, it is only limited to the conceptualization and proof of concept of the system. The control scheme is validated in simulation. The proposed approach is expected to be expanded into other applications in the future.