QuicaBot: Quality Inspection and Assessment Robot

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. Note to Practitioners—This robotic system has the capability of simultaneously assessing five types of defects occupying 80% of the total common defects for the construction quality assessment. It can be used in assessing a building quality during and after the construction process, which can assist the constructors to construct a building with high quality. This proposed system significantly decreases the assessment time and increases the assessment accuracy and consistency. In fact, this system is developed with the main purpose of applying in practical construction automation-related engineering applications.