The International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction
Publications / 2022 Proceedings of the 39th ISARC, Bogotá, Colombia
Constrained Control Scheme for the Manipulation of Heavy Pre-fabricated Elements with Lightweight Robotic Arm
Building activities involving heavy suspended elements are one of the construction activities with the highest level of danger. Typically, during these activities, one or two masons work in conjunction with a machine such as a crane or a lift-ing machine. Several robotics solutions have been proposed to replace the masons during these hazard operations. In this work, we propose to use a lightweight robotic arm to handle and place a heavy suspended object ensuring a high level of precision during the planned operations. To con-trol the resulting robotic system, we propose a constrained control scheme based on Explicit Reference Governor (ERG) theory, an add-on unit that modifies the applied reference in such a way that the trajectory of the system always fulfills the constraints of the system. The simulation results show the efficiency of our approach by testing it against other solutions proposed so far.