Computer-Aided Planning in Masonry Construction

Nowadays, robotic systems are considered as key technologies for construction automation and a way to increase the productivity of the building process. The efficiency of the robot work could be increased by a suitable high level planning system, whereby the sequence of robot working points, the wall’s sequence and the stone flow are computed off-line. Moreover, a global simulation is a means to validate the pre-compute sequences and allow the user to make possible modifications.

This paper presents such a high level planning system. In this system, walls are partitioned into regular and irregular stones, starting from architect drawings. Irregular stones are cut and grouped on pallets at the sawing factory. All the robot working positions, pallet compositions, positions and flow, the wall and stone sequence are computed off-line.