ESPRIT III Project RoadRobot

Operator Assisted Mobile Robot for Heavy Duty Civil Engineering Applications

Table of Contents

1. Project Summary
2. Objectives of the project
3. World wide state of the art
4. Aspects and results contributing to standardization
5. Contacts

1. Project Summary

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In international competition, Europe's building industry has not achieved a very high degree of automation in the past years.
This lack of automation in building industry has resulted in a demand for very flexible, automated heavy-duty machines and in integrated concepts for automated construction sites.
In order to help the European building industry to remain competitive and to enable manufacturers of heavy-duty building machines to sell their products on the world market, new control concepts for heavy-duty machines have to be developed and be brought to a commercial stage.
In the field of out-door construction little research work has been done in recent times. Up to now the use of Information Technology (IT) in outdoor applications, specially in the building industry and automated construction, has been paid no great attention. For that reason existing architectures and modules from other industrial areas have to be adapted to the special requirements of the building industry and new mechatronic components and sensors developed in order to find new ways towards fully or partly automated construction processes.
Our main challenge is now to develop an overall concept for the integration of heavy-duty machines into a sophisticated manufacturing environment, tailored for the requirements of construction industry.
Within the international project seven partners coming from different areas of expertise, are creating in an interdisciplinary approach a generic architecture and a set of flexible modules for the integration of IT into the construction industry.
Due to the complexity of the problem, the general aim will be achieved in two steps. The first step was the definition of needs correlating to the demands of building industry, whereas in the second, and present step, the aim is the development and implementation of a modular control architecture and the flexible automation of well-defined subunits.
According to the results of the project the integration of further subunits will pave the way towards the overall achievement of a global CIM environment for the construction industry.
The main goal of this R&D project was a development of a generic architecture, which could be used to design and develop the various modules of an automated construction site. In the following, after testing the functionality of the modules, they will be integrated in some example machines (a road paver and an excavator) and at last demonstrated and used at a real building site in France.
In the project RoadRobot, all tasks are being preformed according to the proposed plan and schedule. Up until now, the planning and analysing phases have been completed and a generic architecture has been developed. Considering this architecture, the next phase of the project, namely the design and implementation phase has been started and all partners are operating on the various modules of the project.
The development of the generic control architecture is able to be used at all similar construction sites. In this way, the planned demonstration with a road paver and an excavator could be exchanged or expanded by other machines or applications. Therefore, the automation of an entire construction site is required in the planning and could be executed with small effort.
In order to reach as far as possible international standardisation, the development of the various modules will be done with CASE tools using Shlaer/Mellor object-oriented methodology and the information models will be described in STEP/Express. In this way, an overall use of the developed parts is well enabled and gives the European industry the possibility, to transfer and expand the results of the project RoadRobot.

2. Objectives of the project

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The objectives of this project are to adapt a generic control architecture to the requirements of the building industry and to build up and integrate components needed for automated out-door construction purposes. This will enable CIM techniques to be used in the construction industry bringing with it the associated benefits of production quality, costs effectiveness and flexibility.
Recognising the low level of IT in building industry one main point of interest would be to develop information technology for the specific requirements for this sector. Therefore it is important that knowledge and experience are brought in by the building industry, the manufacturers of heavy-duty building machines and the companies with special IT expertise and R&D institutes.
Commercially available machines for construction purposes have only a few automated functions. Even in low levels of process control the degree of automation and autonomy is very low. Depending upon the complexity, a standard heavy-duty construction machine normally needs more than one worker for local manual process control. The automation of machines and with this the reduction of the number of personnel to a minimum of one or less supervisory personnel per machine is a secondary but important aim of the project.
The specific technical aims of the project are:
- development of a multi-purpose architecture for mobile platforms in heavy-duty applications;
- demonstration of the modularity of the developed architecture as well as of the components;
- development of a general control system with a dedicated man-machine interface;
- development of application specific process control components for automated road paving machines and for automated excavators.
Due to the fact, that existing building machines are mainly controlled by manual operations, the quality standard and the occurrence and number of faults are dependent of human behaviour. Automation of several tasks will increase reproducibility of quality standards and safer and more convenient control of the machines concerning the operators and other workers.
The operation of the developed subsystems and control strategies will be demonstrated by the integration of all the subcomponents and tests of the whole system under real conditions.
After the development of the control architecture, the main objectives of RoadRobot are the build up of several modules for automated mobile platforms for the interaction between themselves and the environment, integrated into a building site. Therefore, the partners' work is concentrated on the following aspects:
- Development of a navigational unit concerning development and Integration of the hardware, implementation of the software modules, tests under lab and outdoor conditions, evaluation and refinement
- Definition and implementation of a modular and flexible platform allowing the integration of existing software tools in a CIM environment aimed at outdoor heavy duty civil engineering.
- The use and adaptation of the previously developed "STEP Based Integration Platform" (developed under a Brite-Euram Project) allowing the definition of STEP based models as the core of information exchange within the system.
- Extension of the experience and knowledge base in knowledge based control systems for industrial applications.
- Development of a software tool to help the construction project manager within the excavation plannification process.
- Development of a specific Machine_Controller architecture which allows the automatic control of some excavation tasks and the supervision of the work carried out with the help of the operator.
- Development of a processor board, including the process control for the associated automated functions and an interlinking interface via a local bus system.
For the demonstration of the functions and interactions of the developed systems, a commercially available road paver will be integrated into an overall production management system. For that reason, the paver will be equipped with all the necessary modules, whose functionality will be tested in a prototype, thus leading to exploitable products for a wide range of applications in the field of heavy-duty machines.
The following picture depicts the expected RoadRobot work environment:


The Intergraph product InRoads, a Scheduler Interface, a Planner, an User Interface and Heavy Machinery working on the field are being integrated using SIP, with very good results.

3. World wide state-of-the-art

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Integration of tools in CIM environments has been strongly studied by the international scientific and industrial communities. Several questions have been raised concerning implementation strategies.
The scenery actually found in the outdoor heavy-duty construction, is the one where a small amount of tools has been developed without a global view of the whole construction system. Tools are modeled in different ways so, data communication between tools is an arduous task to carry out.
To avoid the high number of interfaces required, a unique neutral data format should be used. Improving this aspect generally reduces the system maintenance and upgrade efforts.
The contribution of UNINOVA in the Brite-Euram CIMTOFI project resulted in a generic STEP based Integration Platform, called SIP, based on ISO10303 (or STEP - STandard for the Exchange of Product model data). SIP is fundamentally constituted by an EXPRESS Compiler, an Information Management System (IS) and an Information System Access Protocol (ISAP). Several managerial and engineering tools were already integrated using SIP. CAD, CAM, CAPP, MRPII, SFC, dedicated expert systems and other management and engineering tools are examples of that. SIP is, at this time, being used in other industrial environments (e.g. SME Electromechanical Industry).
Adapt this results to the RoadRobot project, is desirable. Heavy efforts are being made in this way. The use of this platform in heavy duty civil engineering is becoming a reality. In order to keep in touch with the latest developments relevant for the work of RoadRobot, some effort has been put on the participation (whenever possible) on relevant events and conferences.

4. Aspects and results contributing to standardisation

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Uninova began to define the Road Model, based on RMK (Road Model Kernel), which was produced by the Dutch Ministry of Transports, Public Works and Water Management and TNO Building and Construction Research. In order to have an accurate idea about the developed RMK entities, Uninova maintained an e-mail conversation with TNO. As a result, it was decided to define a new road model because the Road Model Kernel is not completely defined (just the alignment and associated data is modeled). Moreover, the data produced by the external application (Intergraph's InRoads) could not be fitted on the already defined RMK entities. The work developed by Uninova in the Road Model will allow the enhancement of the RMK and possibly it's standardisation in a near future
The process of elicitation of the knowledge about the road paving process, is performed using the "Structured Knowledge Engineering" method (SKE) developed by the company Bolesian. This method represents the knowledge according to the model defined in the ESPRIT project KADS. This KADS model is the de-facto standard for representing knowledge for AI systems.
In order to organise the information presentation and exchange, the partners decided to carry out the design of the project RoadRobot with help of CASE-tools and the object oriented Shlaer/Mellor methodology.
During the course of the project two main STEP models were produced:

5. Contacts

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UNINOVA - Instituto de Novas Tecnologias
Centro de Robótica Inteligente (CRI)
Quinta da Torre, Campus FCT/UNL
2825 Monte da Caparica
Portugal

Tel: (351-1) 35 00 200 FAX: (351-1) 295 77 86

Ricardo Jardim Gonçalves (Email: rg@uninova.pt)
João Paulo Pimentão (Email: pim@uninova.pt)
pas@uninova.pt)
accesses since 1995/09/08