Cad Environment for Automated and Robotic Construction

423 Successful robotic and automated systems require a well defined, structured and controlled work environment . It is therefore clear that before automation in the construction process can be effectively implemented , uniformity and clarity of the various tasks to be automated must be introduced . The structuring of this process must be addressed in the design phase and maintained through to completion. Preliminary work has been undertaken at UWE on the control of a pick and place robot to construct model walls as specified by a CAD drawing . Control software is able to read an entity list of a wall design , which then calculates the number of bricks required, the orientation and position of each brick and the robot joint angles required to place each brick . This data is then used to produce an off line robot control program, enabling automatic construction of the design from a CAD drawing. This paper discusses the next stage of this research , which is to develop further the previous work into an integrated CAD environment for buildings , which can be post processed into a robotic construction code . This would be an effective and powerful tool for guiding robots on the construction site to undertake a range of tasks associated with the construction of buildings . A CAD environment is proposed which comprises libraries of building components . These components possess individual attribute information which in addition to their physical properties can specify supplementary information, such as assembly requirements , suppliers , price and delivery. A designer can access these component libraries from within the CAD environment , select them from icon menus and insert them into the building design . This information is used as an aid when post processing the completed drawing database using assembly rules and optimisation algorithms in the production of robotic control code . It is envisaged that this database of