Development of refractory brick construction robot in steel works

Factory automation has been largely applied on the existing infrastructure of the steel industry in the perspective of increasing production, reducing cost, increasing customer satisfaction, and sustaining the global competition. Many workers, however, have still physically suffered from the backbreaking work due to the two twelve-hour shifts and continuously repeating jobs under dangerous and unstructured environment. To make the unstructured processes or tasks automated, much research has gone into how industry robots could function autonomously. As a result, many jobs and processes that have routinely operated before have been done without human intervention in the terms of fully automated or semi-automated way. In this paper, we introduce the semi-automated and cooperative robot system being capable of delivering thousands of refractory bricks into the wall of the steel converter by making use of human-robot cooperative technology and a direct teaching method together. The industrial robot understands what the human operators' intention through a force/torque sensor mounted in the end of robot end-effector and performs the refractory brick construction work which requires more accurate motion control. In addition, the industrial robot delivers the refractory bricks without the operator's intervention. By doing so, the human operator can relax from the painful musculoskeletal disease and more importantly, refractory brick construction becomes standardized so that it reduces the man power and hours currently took in the same processes. This paper presents application of the human-robot cooperative system for constructing the steel converter with the refractory bricks.