A Robotized Drilling System for Rocky Wall Consolidation

The paper proposes a new highly automated drilling system able to create holes up to 20 m depth in rocky walls using standard 1.5 m length rods. The drilling system, to be used to automate rocky walls consolidation, has to be positioned in the points of the map earlier defined by the geologist; for this reason it is hosted onto a semiautonomous climbing platform, with rods stored onboard. An automatic system is also required to feed the drilling head with new rods while the hole progresses and to recover the rods once the hole is up. The drilling system mainly consists of: a commercial drilling rig with the requested modifications for the interfacing to an automatic feeding system; a manipulator (endowed with a suitable gripper) for the loading/unloading of the rods; a storage buffer for allocating the rods. In the paper, the alternatives considered for the design of the whole drilling system are shortly recalled, explaining the guidelines which led to the final architecture, as well.