We developed an exterior wall painting robot for the purpose of automating this painting operation. The robot is mounted on equipment which permits it to move up and down, left and right along the exterior walls of a building. It is computer controlled and is activated simply by the operator pressing a switch on the control panel located on the ground. The robot is capable of painting a four square meter wall surface (4 m long X 1 m high) at one time. It is also equipped with sensors which measure indentations and protrusions in the wall surface, making it possible for it to paint exterior walls with windows, pillars or other indentations or protrusions.
The painting of building external walls is usually performed using a gondola or scaffolding, involves working at considerable heights, and is an unclean job due to windblown paint spray. Recently too, there have been problems involving quality due to the lack of skilled painters. As a solution to such problems, painting robots have been developed for the external painting of large scale structures such as nuclear power stations or warehouse buildings. Until now, painting robots have been developed for use with mast type mobile staging. However, in order to provide a more general system and achieve improved work efficiency, a new painting robot was developed that can be suspended from gondola staging. This paper gives a general outline of the newly developed robot and reports the results of field trials that were carried out to verify its effectiveness.
The measurement of cracks in concrete surfaces is a procedure undertaken to diagnose deterioration and the prospective life of concrete structures. The authors have been studying a measuring system which uses computer image processing to reduce labor requirements and increase reliability. In this study crack data were first defined and then a data processing method which combines general-purpose image processing techniques with artificial intelligence theory was developed in order to extract crack patterns from concrete surface data and measure crack length, direction and width. It was found that crack measurements can be processed automatically or with the aid of simple manual operations.
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