Autonomous Sheet Pile Driving Robots for Soil Stabilization

Abstract

Soil stabilization is a fundamental component of nearly all construction projects, ranging from commercial construction to environmental restoration projects. Previous work in autonomous construction has generally not considered these essential stabilization and anchoring tasks. In this work we present Romu, an autonomous robot capable of building continuous linear structures by using a vibratory hammer to drive interlocking sheet piles into soil. We report on hardware parameters and their effects on pile driving performance, and demonstrate autonomous operation in both controlled and natural environments. Finally, we present simulations in which a small swarm of robots build with sheet piles in example terrains, or apply an alternate spray-based stabilizing agent, and quantify the ability of each intervention to mitigate hydraulic erosion.

A large‐scale dataset of buildings and construction sites

“…(Son & Kim, 2021). Foundation and pile foundation object detection and the intelligent transformation (Jud et al, 2019;Heikkila et al, 2012;Melenbrink et al, 2019;Stentz et al, 1998;S. Yang et al, 2020) Of course, the BCS dataset is now an early version, which will be updated regularly.…”

Advances in Forest Robotics: A State-of-the-Art Survey

“…Figure 2. Examples of robotic applications used for environmental preservation and monitoring tasks in forests: (a) Chico Mendes [10], (b) Legged robot [12], (c) SlothBot [13], (d) Ranger and Scout [14], (e) Romu [15], (f) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) robot 1 [16], (g) UAV robot 2 [17], (h) UAV robot 3 [18], (i) UAV robot 4 [19] and (j) UAV robot 5 [20].…”

“…The concept of a swarm of robots was also addressed by Melenbrink and Werfel [15] who developed autonomous sheet pile driving robots for soil stabilization. To reduce hydraulic erosion activities in natural environments, they developed the Romu robot (Figure 2e) which has four wheels mounted on vertical linear actuators to assist in the task of fixing steel piles to the ground.…”

“…By means of a vibratory hammer system and the reduction of the height of the robot, the system was able to fix the piles in sandy soils to a depth of 6-8 cm. Based on a computer simulation, where several piles were fixed in sandy terrain, when simulating a stream of water going down the sandy terrain, 50% of the soil that would be lost was retained by the barrier, indicating its great application potential [15]. Although this application is not in a forest, the challenges are similar, since the dunes environment is non-structured.…”

“…A characteristic commonly observed when analyzing the works [14,15,18,19] is the ability to use wireless communication technologies to exchange information between different robotic systems (aerial and terrestrial robots) and smart devices, sensors that detect the forest fires and monitor the quality of air, soil, water and vegetation indexes. In this sense, it is proposed as a future research work to integrate intelligent sensors (temperature, humidity, gas and luminosity) with forest robotic systems, since through the fusion of such technologies it will be possible to carry out forest preservation and monitoring activities of large portions of Earth with high spatial and temporal resolution.…”