Robotic assembly of interlocking CNC-cut sheets into a wall component

Redesign the CNC-cut elements of the wall component in order to reduce the robotic automatic assembly time

Master thesis (2019)

Authors

J.P. de Bruijn Architecture and the Built Environment

Contributors

P.M.M. Stoutjesdijk Building Product Innovation - Architecture and the Built Environment (supervisor 1)
Serdar Așut Design Informatics - Architecture and the Built Environment (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Architecture and the Built Environment
Copyright: © 2019 Jeroen de Bruijn
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Published Date

28-06-2019

Language

English

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Faculty

Architecture and the Built Environment

Abstract

There is a large pressure on the construction industry in the Netherlands because there are not enough skilled employees and 1 million new homes need to be built before 2030. TheNewMakers (TNM) want to radically change how buildings are being constructed in order to speed up the building process. TNM is applying their LEGO inspired building system that consists out of a database with building blocks. One of these building blocks is a wall component, which is applied in the façade of a tiny house. The aim of this research is to apply a robot to assemble CNC cut elements into this wall component. To achieve this goal, the wall component will be redesigned with the main focus on reducing the automatic assembly time.

Literature research was conducted and a robotic assembly process hypothesis was made. This robotic process hypothesis provided input for: a robotic assembly experiment and a robotic simulation. For the experiment only a small robot was available and, therefore, only a section of the wall component was considered. The experiment was conducted in collaboration with HBO mechatronic students. This experiment helped to physically test the suggested improvements of the wall component. The robotic simulation helped to measure how long it would take when a large robot would assemble the whole wall component. This allowed a time comparison between the simulated robotic and manual assembly process of the whole wall component.

The literature research helped to choose a robot for the robotic assembly process hypothesis, which was the industrial robot Smart5 NJ 110-3.0 from Comau. Redesigning the elements of the wall component allowed for an easier assembly sequence. Besides that, extra geometry tolerances ensured certain steps of the robotic assembly process could be performed faster and were less prone to failure.

The robotic simulation showed that the robot is at least 1,17 times faster than a human, which would mean the annual production of the robot is about 5,5 times higher. The CNC milling process takes about 8 times more than the robotic assembly process.