Automated Surface Profiling of Drywall Surface for Sanding

The growing interest in the industrialization of construction process; promotes opportunities for automation. Automation brings improvement in quality and productivity, while reducing worker’s exposure to hazardous work environments. The integration of robotics in interior finishing works, such as sanding and painting of drywalls is a relatively new concept. Progressing to a stage where fully autonomous robots are used for interior finishing works requires intermediate steps; namely surface profiling. This paper describes a theoretical concept of shadow profilometery to profile the surface of an installed drywall. A shadow was cast over the area under consideration, and the shadow profile was captured as a 2D image by a camera. Digital image processing techniques were utilized for identifying regions that deviate from a flat surface. The methodology discussed in this paper, was tested on a virtual system, and the results were found to be encouraging.