ROBOCRANE

Shipbuilding

Tools for Shipbuilding

Flying Carpet

Through an Office of Naval Research project, the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) teamed with Atlantic Marine, Inc. in Mobile, Alabama to study efficient methods to repair ships in dry dock or along a pier. The concept developed in this project, called the Flying Carpet, combines two main technologies: the NIST RoboCrane and commercially available suspended scaffolding to produce an effective concept for worker access to ships, submarines, buildings, and other large objects. While RoboCrane can lift large, heavy and awkward loads, its stability and maneuverability allow advanced programming techniques more analogous to robots than cranes. The RoboCrane combines sensors, a computer, a platform and tensioned cables to perform heavy manufacturing and construction tasks, such as: lifting and positioning heavy loads and manipulation of workers, tools and parts. The RoboCrane manipulator can improve worker accessibility to ships and buildings for performing tasks such as: assembly, fixturing, welding, cutting, grinding, machining, surface finishing and inspection. In the videos, the Flying Carpet is demonstrating two configurations: Ship Bow/Stern access and Ship Side access. These two configurations use the same platform to achieve efficient access to external or large ship surfaces. The videos show full motion control side-to-side, up-and-down, back-and-forth, and yaw about the vertical axis while maintaining level through the system kinematics and a redundant level sensor. Ship Bow and Stern access configurations provides more yaw rotation due to it's rear point being positioned further away from the front support points.

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Last updated: June 18, 2003