Development of Segment Automatic Building Intelligent System (SABIS)

The shield tunneling method has been developed as a method of constructing tunnels in soft ground. The constructing process is that the shield machine drills the tunnel space, and a ring of segments is built by few number of workerrs using nuts and bolts. Recently, tunnel diameters increased, so that the segment pieces are larger and heavier. there are some problems such as 1) Dangerous work, 2) Workers skill, 3) Shortage of workers. To cope with these problems. NKK has jointly developed the Segment Automatic Building Intelligent System (SABIS) with HAZAMA-GUMI Ltd. In this paper, we describe three development steps, First we design mechanism by CAD system (CATIA ***** robotics ) and simulate its motion, Secondly we made nuts and bolts supply/fastening machine and the mechanism of gripping segments as a verification, Thirdly we made prototype SABIS and try tests to build up a ring of segments, and get a result positioning accuracy is +/- 0.5mm.