Robots for Tiling

Millions of square meters of wall- and floor tiling are being layed manually at great expense in time and manpower. There is a great potential for rationalisation in the tiling of large areas (swimming pools, supermarkets, industrial plants, etc.) and in the series production of prefabricated bathrooms for hotels or tiled wall-elements for the renovation of homes. The Fraunhofer Institut Produktionstechnik und Automatisierung (IPA), Stuttgart has developed alternative concepts for automation of these areas and has set up and tested prototypes. The automation process includes the application of mortar or tile glue to the wall or the floor (floating process), or the direct covering of the tiles (buttering process) as well as the placement of the tiles. In the series production of tiled wall-elements and prefabricated bathrooms stationary industrial robots are being used. The tiling of large areas on the building site needs mobile robot systems with a navigation system for rough positioni ng at the respective site and an optical sensor system for precision positioning at the respective laying position. The fitting process is controlled by a multisensor system which is integrated into the tool. The multisensor system and an intelligent controller ensure both an exact level positioning of the tiles to hold an even width of the gap and also the height of the tiles to each other to get a level surface. For the vertical tiling process the adherence of the tiles is examined.