Quality assessment during postconstruction of buildings is an indispensable procedure in construction industry. This paper describes the design and development of a quality inspection and assessment robot (QuicaBot) that can autonomously scan the entire room using cameras and laser scanners to pick up building defects, such as hollowness, crack, evenness, alignments, and inclination. A robotic system consisting of four types of sensors and a mobile platform as well as the corresponding five types of assessment algorithms is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to have a complete robotic system for postconstruction quality assessment of buildings. The aim of the developed system is twofold: first, to systematize the manual inspection work through automation resulting in more reliable and objective inspection reports, and then, to speed up the inspection process resulting in a more efficient end product. Based on our experimental on-site tests, the developed novel robot takes only half of the manual inspection time when inspecting the same room. We have also observed that the autonomous assessment results have better inspection accuracy when compared to manual assessments. Last but not least, the results provided by QuicaBot have more consistent measurement accuracy when compared to a manual assessor. Motivated by the initial successful on-site tests and as being a practical mechatronic system illustrating how sensing, sensor fusion, and actuation can be integrated to achieve an intelligent system for building defects assessment, we believe that the QuicaBot-like robots are going to become an integral part of construction industry in the near future.

In a multiwire slicer, it is very crucial to keep wire sending smooth and tension constant to guarantee the quality of silicon wafers. Since the wire sending status has impact on the wire tension, it needs to be controlled to be smooth enough first. The measurement of the wire sending state is based on the two tensometers near the wire sending point and the tension adjusting unit, respectively. The measuring principle is given in detail. The smooth wire sending control is realized through a position adjusting unit. To achieve good control performance, the wire sending state is divided into several sections, and a novel feedforward multiconditioned P controller is designed. After the smooth wire sending controller is designed, the factors related to the wire tension vibration are analyzed deeply, and then, a self-tuning fuzzy controller is proposed. The parameters of the controller can be tuned according to the wire moving velocity. To show the validity of the proposed method, experiments on real platform are well conducted.

This paper describes the design and development of an automated construction quality assessment robot system (QuicaBot) for hollowness, crack, evenness, alignments and inclination problems. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to pave the way towards a fully autonomous robotic system for post construction quality assessment of buildings. The main goal of the novel robot is twofold: to systematize the manual inspection work through automation resulting in more reliable and objective inspection reports, and to speed up the inspection process resulting in a cost reduction. Based-on our initial on-site tests, the developed robot increases the overall efficiency in all the aforementioned five problems.

Utilizing construction quality standards for almost perfect building projects ensures future marketability of projects, customer satisfaction and maximization of asset value. This paper describes a novel robot system to autonomously assess the post-construction quality of buildings which is currently done manually by using human inspectors. However, manual inspection always has the disadvantages, such as labile inspection accuracy, being time consuming and indistinct recording. As a novel solution to the aforementioned drawbacks, a mobile robot is equipped with a laser scanner, a thermal camera, an inclinometer and a RGB camera to achieve an autonomous assessment system. This proposed system can assess five types of defects: evenness, alignment, cracks, hollowness, and inclination. A movable trolley with different mechanisms are designed to mount and integrate all these sensors. Its mechanical design with four motors and one linear actuator, which are installed to increase the measurement range of sensors, is also presented. The experimental tests show that the proposed system has a great potential in construction quality assessment area in building sector.