Abstract
Vertical gardens have emerged alongside the increase in urban density and land scarcity to reintegrate greenery in the built environment. Existing maintenance for vertical gardens is labour-intensive, time-consuming and is being increasingly complemented by robotic applications. While research has been focused on enhancing robot design to improve productivity, minimal effort has been done on ‘design for robots’ in creating suitable environments for optimal robot deployments. This paper proposed a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together architects, designers, and roboticians to adapt the design of the vertical garden infrastructure to counteract the limitations of the maintenance robot. A case study on an existing plant maintenance robot ‘Urodela’ was conducted to determine the limitations encountered by robotic aid during operation. A robot-inclusive modular design for vertical gardens is proposed based on robot-inclusive principles, namely manipulability and safety, along with architectural design considerations. Design explorations for different configurations of track layouts of the proposed robot-inclusive modular design for vertical gardens is further analysed to validate its applicability and scalability.
Highlights
Vertical green landscapes is a method for reinstating greenery into rapidly growing urbanised areas [1,2]
The main motivation of this paper is to propose a robot-inclusive green wall design, where the robot can perform better in terms of arm manipulability and safety
Research has shown that robotics has been playing an increasingly important role to assist in maintenance and inspection tasks
Summary
Vertical green landscapes is a method for reinstating greenery into rapidly growing urbanised areas [1,2]. The rail structure allows the movement of the robot to cover a wide area on the vertical plane Even though these climbing robots can cope with extended heights, these robots still face issues that degrade their productivity in most of the existing vertical garden designs. Designing for robots allows the implementation of robotics technology in more areas of work to complement human labour and reduce safety hazards, eventually boosting productivity and outputs. This is mainly achieved by modifying spatial layouts, choosing and integrating robot-inclusive designs into the building architecture.
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