Multi-drone Collaborative Planning for Prefabricated Façade Installation on Heritage Buildings

Buildings in the EU account for 40% of energy consumption according to the European Commission. Considering the UN SDGs and the EU’s 2050 decarbonization goal, roughly 97% of the buildings require energy retrofit, while only around 1% are upgraded annually. To expedite this, installing prefabricated façade modules have shown to considerably improve energy efficiency within days. This process, however, requires an automated solution to detect the building façades, plan for modularization, and assemble the modules to support scalability in mass. This study presents a new method to automatically plan the size, location and schedule of the modules for active drone assembly by: (i) detecting the boundary of façade segments; (ii) determining the size and location of the modules by solving an integer programming problem; and (iii) planning for installation by incorporating location-based scheduling principles as the solution to a new multiple asymmetric traveling salesman problem (m-ATSP) formulation. The methodology was applied on a heritage façade dataset acquired from OpenHeritage and the results of five variations of the m-ATSP to install 183 modules using five drones from three sources were presented. ... mehrThe outcome of this study presents new avenues to incorporate active drones into the automatic assembly and rehabilitation of façades at scale–whether for new construction, architectural renovation or energy retrofit.