As jobsite technology evolves, there are expected improvements in safety, time and, cost savings. Here, CRETech shows how researchers are using a drone equipped with a nail gun to shingle a roof, which can be an incredibly dangerous job for humans - where will technologies like this be headed?
Drones — specifically quadcopters — are a versatile bunch. They’ve been used to inspect gas terminals, oil rigs, and turbines for wear and tear by startups like Sterblue, Clobotics, General Electric spinoff Avitas Systems, and Cyberhawk. French firefighters tapped them to survey Notre Dame during the recent blaze. And San Francisco-based Matternet is collaborating with UPS to launch an aerial medical specimen delivery service in Raleigh, North Carolina.
But a team at the University of Michigan’s Department of Aerospace Engineering might be the first to retrofit drones for autonomous roofing. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, they describe a DJI S1000 octocopter outfitted with an off-the-shelf nailgun that could be adjusted to match the angle of roof slopes. They report that in preliminary tests, their airborne roofer managed to nail within a three-centimeter gap (just below the sealing strip and above the exposure cutouts) on target shingles.
The paper’s coauthors say they chose the S1000 for its high payload limit (the takeoff weight including the nailgun assembly worked out to 9.25 kilograms) and long flight time (10 minutes with the aforementioned assembly), and for its robust suite of open source development tools. As for the nailgun, they selected a tetherless model — the RYOBI AirStrike — whose buttons could be triggered by an onboard electronic relay circuit, such that software triggered the relay at the press of a limit switch.
Read More
