Study on Motion Planning Based on Sensor for the Robotic Building Maintenance System

Abstract

High rise building that is defined as higher than 50th floors or 200 meters building tends to be increased gradually due to increasing citizen in downtown and demanding. But, expensive cost of construction and difficulty of maintenance is caused by growing high-rise buildings and large-scale buildings. In specific, maintenance works for high-rise buildings, significantly depend on human labor, unlike other construction processes that are gradually being automated. Thus, economic and social lose because of unsecured high-quality manpower and safety accident is pretty huge. As the necessity of automation of high-rise building maintenance is getting increased, the study on BMU(Building Maintenance Unit) automation and related robots has been actively conducted mainly by Europe, Japan, and the U.S. to address issues stated above. For instance, Fraunhofer IPA and Manntech in Germany, Nihon Bisoh in Japan, etc have conducted model operations of robot platforms. In particular, Nihon Bisoh in Japan has applied robots to cleaning work of high-rise buildings such as Landmark Tower and Osaka Crystal Tower and successfully commercialized the items. The domestic study, in contrast, has been limited only to a laboratory experiment and focused only on wall climbing mechanisms. It is of great urgency to develop practical technologies. This study proposes the built-in-guide type robotic building maintenance system using additional module such as guidance mullion to the facade. In addition, To enhance the safety and efficiency of the system, herein, the strategy is proposed for localization algorithm to the position control of the robot. In addition, the efficient motion planning method of robots will be presented based on the developed localization algorithm.