Automatic assembly system for modular structure

Automated construction is in high demand in many applications in the extreme environments such as space structure construction. In order to avoid exposure of human workers, construction machines are usually remote-controlled for such applications. Because of communication delay and narrow communication bandwidth, such systems require high-level expertise and also are ineffective and frustrating to the operators. We have proposed a novel concept of automated construction called automatic Modular Assembly System. In this system, we use cubic modules to build structures, which have automatic connectors for handling by special assembler robots. The assembler robots are autonomous manipulators, which transport and assemble the modules. We have built a scaled prototype model and did some experiments of automatic assembly. In this paper, we deal with an algorithm to construct large shell structures made of rectangular shaped panels which consist of many modules. We use a group of autonomous assembler robots for the construction and intelligent structure modules. We did some assembly simulations to evaluate the performance of autonomous-distributed algorithm.