As the demand for mass customization grows in off-site construction projects, the manufacturing phase requires greater flexibility to handle the increasing complexity of customized components. This flexibility can be achieved through robotic manufacturing (RM), but only if the actionable instructions and machine-readable programs required by industrial robots can be automatically generated from customized design models. Automating this process would eliminate the need for manual data transfers, reduce design rework, and improve accuracy when translating digital designs into manufacturable components, thus enabling flexible manufacturing and supporting mass customization. However, traditional Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools—commonly used for design in off-site construction—are not inherently equipped to support direct robotic programming, creating significant barriers to automating the manufacturing process.
The lack of technological interoperability between BIM and RM systems presents a major challenge, as it restricts the high level of precision and flexibility necessary for mass customization in construction projects. Consequently, manufacturers are unable to efficiently meet diverse client specifications while maintaining the cost and time savings required for large-scale production. Furthermore, existing BIM-RM workflows are fragmented, lack scalability, and often rely on visual programming environments like Grasshopper, which are not easily transferable between projects. This results in the need to manually reprogram tasks for each new project, limiting scalability. Additionally, current solutions require users to have programming knowledge, making them less user-friendly and harder to adopt at an industrial scale.
The solution developed to address the challenge of BIM-RM interoperability is a comprehensive, automated workflow that integrates Building Information Modeling with Robotic Manufacturing processes. This solution bridges the gap between design and manufacturing by streamlining the Design-to-Manufacturing process, enabling seamless data exchange between BIM models and robotic systems. The framework automates the generation of machine-readable instructions directly from the BIM environment, eliminating the need for manual data transfers and minimizing design rework.
At the core of this solution are custom-developed APIs for Autodesk Revit (BIM software) and ABB RobotStudio (robotic programming and simulation software). These APIs, respectfully, extract precise data from BIM models, such as geometric dimensions and component coordinates, and translate them into executable robotic commands. By integrating this automated data extraction and conversion process, the framework ensures that digital design models can be easily and accurately interpreted by industrial robots for manufacturing. The developed system also creates a virtual workstation within RobotStudio to simulate and refine robotic operations before production, ensuring precision and reducing the risk of errors in the physical manufacturing phase. This approach not only addresses the issue of technological fragmentation between BIM and RM systems but also enhances scalability, as the same process can be replicated across multiple projects without requiring any line of reprogramming.
Overall, the solution resolves the challenge by providing a robust, user-friendly, and scalable workflow that integrates BIM-driven design with robotic manufacturing, improving efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, and facilitating the mass customization in off-site construction projects.
