Surface Profiling the Sanding Process of Dry Wall on Construction

• Author / Creator

  Alex, Dony Cherian

• The growing interest in the industrialization of construction process; promotes opportunities for automation. Automation brings improvement in quality and productivity, while reducing worker’s exposure to hazardous work environments. The integration of robotics in interior finishing works, such as sanding and painting of drywalls is a relatively new concept. Progressing to a stage where fully autonomous robots are used for interior finishing works requires intermediate steps; namely surface profiling. This thesis describes a theoretical concept of shadow profilometery to profile the surface of an installed drywall. A shadow was cast over the area under consideration, and the shadow profile was captured as a 2D image by a camera. Digital image processing techniques were utilized for identifying regions that deviate from a flat surface. The methodology discussed in this research, was tested on a virtual system, and the results were found to be encouraging.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Automated Sanding
  • Shadow Profilometry
  • Surface Profiling

• Graduation date

  Spring 2011

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3RS78

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.