“We achieved the first robotic system to build a wall, it’s a really big retaining wall, 60 meters long and six meters high at its highest point, containing about 930 stones. a structure we built two years ago and it’s still there. “It was the first time in robotics that this type of structure could be built at this scale.” He who expresses himself in this manner is industrial engineer Rubén Mascaró Palliserfrom Alaior, 31, from the Universitat Politècnica de Barcelona (UPC) and a PhD in robotics and artificial vision from the Federal Polytechnic School of Zurich (ETHZurich, in German abbreviation), where he works as a researcher.
Former Jew Rubén Mascaró lectures at the Official College of Industrial Technical Engineers of Menorca on the topic “Artificial vision and mobile robots: towards advanced automation in unstructured environments», in which he offered a summary of what he researched in particular during his doctoral thesis carried out between 2019 and 2023, which is «basically perception for robots, i.e. how robots, based on the information they collect with various sensors, they can understand what the space that surrounds them is like, we do it in unstructured environments, in this case we are not talking about those that would be factories that are designed for robots to carry out a series of pre-programmed tasks in a way that is very efficient and above all iterative, so like everything it is designed to act a continuous process, you don’t really need to know what’s going on around you. “When you take a robot into an unstructured environment, you can’t predict what it’s like, for example, autonomous cars that have to adapt to traffic conditions, to people, to avoid accidents,” he says.
Building a retaining wall using a robotic machine that uses sensors to interpret the space surrounding it and place stones to raise the wall. | Ruben Mascaro
And also They can be home robots that can help the elderly or people with disabilitiesand they need to know how they can move and interact with objects of any shape and position in order to plan actions and interact in that environment. These are robots that use sensors to create a three-dimensional model of what their environment would be like and how they can detect objects in that environment.
Mascaró assures that this topic is still focused on research because it is a very new application, robots are implemented in industry, above all the process is completely automated and if, for example, an object arrives on an automatic belt, it knows where to take it from. In this sense, he points out to the fact that “we are trying build structures with natural rocks, not modified by manthat weighs tons and we use an excavator that is robotic, but we are talking about material that has arbitrary shapes, you can’t know what material is in front of you, what that material is going to be, without processing your environment the robot must first be able to identify this object and how to reconstruct the 3D model of each of the stones and then himself, once he has these digitized models, there is an algorithm that decides how to place these objects to create a stable structure,” he points out.
Mascaró confirms that it is not the intention for the robot to completely replace the human being because “there are so many things that can go wrong and that the robot probably doesn’t realize that I believe that there must always be a person behind it“It’s not that a person should be inside the machine and manipulate, but rather that they should supervise the process, see that everything is going well and be able to repair the robot if necessary,” he emphasizes.
Note
“A robotic machine that builds ‘drywall’ and why not?”
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.OkPrivacy policy
