Emulation of Automated Structural Steelwork Erection Using Cimsteel Integration Standards

Automation is being increasingly explored as a possible solution for safely increasing productivity in structural steelwork erection. A piece of automation equipment such as a robotic crane has no intrinsic knowledge of the steel erection process it automates. Thus, geometric and spatial information about a steel member and the motion sequences that must be executed to move that component from a staging area to its installed final location must both be programmed into the equipment. The equipment must minimally know where a steel member in question is currently staged, and what the final installed position and orientation of the member is in the erected structure. The presented research investigates the extent to which the CIMsteel Integration Standards (CIS/2) can specify product descriptions capable of supporting automated erection of structural steelwork. Algorithms to interpret steel member geometry and spatial configuration from CIS/2 files were designed. Then, a kinematically smart crane capable of accepting robot-like instructions was implemented in 3D virtual reality. The crane was programmed to utilize the algorithms to automatically extract member information from CIS/2, and to use that information to compile assembly instructions for erecting the structure in the virtual world. Based on the emulation results, it was found that CIS/2 does encapsulate the basic geometry and pose of steel members in a format that, after geo-referencing, can be used to support automated steelwork erection. However, several processing steps are necessary before the extracted data can be readily used to program automation equipment.