A cable-driven robot for architectural constructions: a visual-guided approach for motion control and path-planning

Abstract

Cable-driven robots have received some attention by the scientific community and, recently, by the industry because they can transport hazardous materials with a high level of safeness which is often required by construction sites. In this context, this research presents an extension of a cable-driven robot called SPIDERobot, that was developed for automated construction of architectural projects. The proposed robot is formed by a rotating claw and a set of four cables, enabling four degrees of freedom. In addition, this paper proposes a new Vision-Guided Path-Planning System (V-GPP) that provides a visual interpretation of the scene: the position of the robot, the target and obstacles location; and optimizes the trajectory of the robot. Moreover, it determines a collision-free trajectory in 3D that takes into account the obstacles and the interaction of the cables with the scene. A set of experiments make possible to validate the contribution of V-GPP to the SPIDERobot while operating in realistic Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal working conditions, as well as, to evaluate the interaction between the V-GPP and the motion controlling system. The results demonstrated that the proposed robot is able to construct architectural structures and to avoid collisions with obstacles in their working environment. The V-GPP system localizes the robot with a precision of 0.006 m, detects the targets and successfully generates a path that takes into account the displacement of cables. Therefore, the results demonstrate that the SPIDERobot can be scaled up to real working conditions.

Reconfigurable fully constrained cable-driven parallel mechanism for avoiding collision between cables with human

“…Analysis of this approach takes less computational time and is practical in real-time application, while the collision between cables and obstacles inside the CDPM workspace is not considered, whereas the effect of the collision avoidance method in the workspace is discussed in our presented paper. Pinto et al [42] proposed SPIDERobot as 4-DOF-driven mechanism for pick and place in industrial applications. A new approach is introduced based on visually locating the robot's position and the position of obstacles to optimize the robot's trajectory by visual interpretation of the workspace.…”

Overview of cable parallel robots

“…В работе [12] разработан ТПР под названием SPIDERobot с четырьмя степенями свободы для автоматизированного строительства, (рис. 4).…”

A Novel Step Optimal Path Planning Algorithm for the Spherical Mobile Robot Based on Fuzzy Control

“…The study of path planning is of great significance to improve the level of intelligence, autonomous navigation and operation [10]. Currently, local path planning methods are widely used in unknown environments.…”

“…This paper use Matlab to complete the simulation experiments under unknown environment. The main purpose of experiments are to verify whether the fuzzy control method can complete the path planning from the starting point to the target point in random environments, and whether the path can satisfy the optimality [10], [22]. This paper also use Matlab to build simulation models, including the fuzzy controller, the spherical robot motion model, and the ultrasonic sensor model, etc.…”