The HR-Recycler project deals with activities related to ‘hybrid human-robot recycling activities for electrical and electronic equipment’ operating in an indoor environment. One of the tasks of the project focus on the development of a “hybrid recycling factory for electrical and electronic equipment”. For this aim, CS GROUP is developing a 3D Building Editor which will has the ability to allow people to rapidly design 3D model of their factory. The main objective of this building editor is to provide an easy-to-use 3D modelling tool. The building editor allows to produce multi-level floor 3D models following BIM and uses the widely used Industry Foundation Classes (.ifc) open as a file format for interoperability.
During the project we have worked to provide a tool that allows to design in a few clicks the 3D plan of the factory that contain the essential elements such as walls, windows, floors, stairs…
For robot navigation purpose the tool was designed to enable the creation of “navigation mesh” used to assign a specific state to an area for example to help AGV’s navigation. This option will allow to distinguish between different areas to avoid human and robot collision.
As shown in the Figure 1 and Figure 2 the tool implemented allows to quickly draw a 3D plan, design windows, walls, doors and even specific areas that represents the robot navigation area, while offering two views to the users one in 2D and a second in 3D.
For example (Figure 3) we have implemented a very simple process to draw walls, the user first selects the “Wall” tool in the top toolbar (Figure 2). The user just has to position the first point of the wall and add the following ones. Once created, a wall can be edited unless its position has been secured and locked.
In the same way windows and doors can be easily placed on the 2D view by selecting the right icon in the toolbar. We highlighted in red if an element cannot be placed at the selected location.
Following this methods storeys can be easily added and managed within the building editor by using the “Buildings” menu as shown in Figure 1.
Furthermore, as described above, we have worked to allow the user to create navigation mesh (Figure 4) as soon as the factory floor model is created. Indeed, through the tool the user can draw areas shown in red in the 2D view and in green in the 3D view on the Figure 4 that represent mesh navigation. The robot will thus be able to know the zones where it is authorized to circulate. These zones, once created with the building editor, can be extracted to be interpreted by the FFM and the factory floor orchestrator during the factory setup export.
Once the 3D model completed the user can export it to the factory floor configurator and the Factory floor orchestrator to allow the positioning of the different POIs and other orchestration purposes.
