Putty Plastering Realized by a Force Controlled Robotic Scraper

Research on construction robotics has attracted increasing attention as the rising labor costs become prominent. Compliance control, including impedance/admittance control, is considered as a classical approach for robotic manipulation tasks involving contact. In this paper, we propose a putty plastering strategy based on a force controlled scraper which is mounted at the end-effector of an interior finishing robot. In order to control the quality of putty plastering, we verified several strategy including active parameters adjustment of impedance control, active adjustment of scraper speed/tilt angle. The plastering experiments in a construction site proved that the proposed plastering strategy is effective. The evenness and coated putty thickness can meet the quality requirements.