CAD Environment for Automated and Robotic Construction

Successful robotic and automated systems require a well defined, structured and controlled work environment. It is therefore clear that before automation in the construction process can be effectively implemented, uniformity and clarity of the various tasks to be automated must be introduced. The structuring of the process must be addressed in the design phase and maintained through to completion.Preliminary work has been undertaken at UWE on the control of a pick and place robot to construct model walls as specified by a CAD drawing. Control software is able to read an entity list of a wall design, which then calculates the number of bricks required, the orientation the position of each brick and the robot joint angles required to place each brick. This data is then used to produce an off line robot control program, enabling automatic construction of the design from a CAD drawing.This paper discusses the next stage of this research, which is to develop further the previous work into an integrated CAD environment for buildings, which can be post processed into a robotic construction code. This would be an effective and powerful tool for guiding robots on the construction site to undertake a range of tasks associated with construction of buildings. A CAD environment is proposed which comprises libraries of building components. These components possess individual attribute information which in addition to their physical properties can specify supplementary information, such as assembly requirements, suppliers, price and delivery. This information is used as an aid when post processing the completed drawing database using assembly rules and optimization algorithms in the production of robotic control code.