Daehie Hong

Building wall maintenance robot based on built-in guide rail

There have been built a large number of high-rise buildings equipped with facades (curtain-walls) in modern cities. These facades must be periodically maintained with manual procedures that are costly and risky. For this reason, the interest in developing and employing service robots for the building wall maintenance has been increased. Automation and robotics technologies allow safe and environmentally friendly facade cleaning, monitoring, and painting, which also reduce the cost of these tasks. These systems resolve the current safety problems associated with difficult and dangerous access, contributing to a zero injury and fatality in working performance. This paper deals with developing a Building Wall Maintenance Robot (BWMR) system based on a guide rail built in curtain-wall. The robot consists of both of horizontal and vertical units. The horizontal unit performs the maintenance works and is carried up and down by the vertical unit. The robot is designed to be fully automatic unlike other existing similar types of maintenance systems. Its feasibility has been verified through the experiments with down-sized robot and lab-scale building façade.

A Survey on Robot Systems for High-rise Building Wall Maintenance

With recent growth of the economy and development of construction technology, the increase of high-rise buildings is appearing rapidly in urban areas. For this reason, the interest in building maintenance has also been increasing. However, it has many safety problems because it is difficult for the workers to access the exterior wall of building. Therefore, the maintenance system of high-rise building stands out as being important issues to be developed, so that a variety of robot systems have been developed to accomplish the building-wall maintenance works. In this paper, the maintenance robots are classified in painting, inspecting, cleaning systems according to the maintenance works. Then, their locomotion and adhesion mechanisms are analyzed including their applicability to the real maintenance works. This study can be used to develop maintenance robotic system that is more efficient and stable than existing ones.

Forward Motion Performance of a Mechanism Based on Self-growing Organisms

There exists many types of motion mechanisms, such as wheel type, crawler type, legged mobile type, inchworm type, and so on. These conventional motion mechanisms require kinematic pair and driving force to generate relative movement to each other. A new concept of motion mechanism different from the conventional ones was proposed. It was called Self-Growing Mechanism (SGM), since it mimics the motion properties of self-growing organisms such as amoeboid movement and growth of liane. Unlike the conventional motion mechanisms that require traction force between their kinematic pair, the SGM applies only contact force on object surface. This is due to its self-growing nature rather than leaning against the pair surface when pushed forward. In this paper, a few auxiliary attachments and various applications are introduced in order to practically realize the mechanism. Also, the properties regarding forward motion performance of the SGM are studied by some experiments using prototype.

Proposal of Workspace Mapping Method for Conversion-less Unmanned Excavation System to Improve Operative Performance

The highest incidence of disaster at a construction site is about 33.1% and this disaster occurs when an excavator is operated in dangerous site that can have rollover, confinement, and fall. The development of unmanned excavator is realized briskly for the safety of the operator from these dangers. The system to operate an excavator from a remote can be divided into conversion and mounted type. We have implemented this research about a system that has advantages of conversion and mounted type. This system enables excavators to be unmanned and remotely controlled without any renovation, remodeling, change, or transformation by applying attachable and separable mechanism and modules and this proposed system has advantages of conversion and mounted type. The system had a problem of poor operation performance due to the workspace inconsistency between remote controller and lever control robot, which produced lower speed. To improve this problem, the workspace mapping between remote controller and the robot to operate the lever of an excavator is proposed to improve the workability of excavator that is operated from a remote in this paper.

Efficiency Evaluation of Wind Power Blade Surface Cleaning using Brush and Water Jet

Blades of wind energy plants are exposed to external shocks or internal cracks during operation. Furthermore, the blade surfaces can be contaminated by substances such as dust, blood of birds, salt or insects which can decrease the electricity generation efficiency significantly. For this reason, many blade cleaning companies started to appear and a variety of methods for cleaning were suggested. Despite these diverse methods, there has been no study to investigate how effectively to clean the substances in quantitative manner. In this paper, the cleaning efficiency of two rotor blade cleaning methods, brush and water-jet, is examined through experiments by changing operating parameters. Then, the optimal operating conditions for both methods are derived.

A Surface Adaptive Moving Mechanism for Wind Turbine Blade Maintenance Robot

As energy shortage is getting more serious, wind energy source is more promoted around the world. Blade is a key component of wind turbine. Local breakages and/or contamination in the blade bring degradation in aerodynamic efficiency and life-time. However, it is not easy and even dangerous for human workers to access the blade for inspection and maintenance since its size is huge and located at high mountains and rough sea, which are windy places. This paper deals with a novel moving mechanism that efficiently carries human workers or robots to the wind turbine blade. The proposed mechanism utilizes flexible tube with pressurized air that rolls and climbs over the blade surface. So, the tube naturally adapts the changing surface of the blade and acts no harm to it. This paper discusses about its concept, detail design, and advantages. The feasibility of the proposed mechanism is proved through experiments prototype.

Development of a seismic-wind load effect experiment system for built-in guide rail building maintenance robot

In these days, there are a large number of high-rise buildings constructed with facades (curtain-Pwalls). These facades must be maintained with manual procedures regularly, and each of the periodic procedure is very expensive and risky. For this reason, the interest in developing and employing service robots for the building maintenance has been increased. In this paper, deals with developing a Building Wall Maintenance Robot (BWMR) system based on a guide rail built in curtain-wall. With this BWMR system, we applied an actuator-excited vibration experimental system and a computer simulation to judge the safeness of Robot system. A method using a shaking system as the shaker is proposed so that the experiment can be applied to a secondary structural system attached to a primary structural system. Results of this experiment can be index of reliability for BWMR designing and manufacturing.