This study reports an autonomous fine dust source tracking system of a water spray robot for high-rise building demolition. The core function of this system is performing a self-controlled fine dust tracking of the endpoint of the excavator, which is the fine dust generation point. The water spray robot has a lift with a parallelogram-shaped linkage to lift the water spray drum to 10 m from the ground. The sensor network system is connected to the robot and the excavator to calculate the relative position of the water spray drum and excavator endpoint using forward kinematics. RTK-GPS is attached to the robot and the excavator to calculate the relative distance. By sensor network, forward kinematics, and RTK-GPS, the water spray robot can autonomously track fine dust generation point and spray water to the endpoint of the excavator. The experiment was conducted to confirm the accuracy of kinematics calculation and tracking performance of the robot. The first experiment showed that the calculation result of forward kinematics was accurate enough to fulfill tracking operations. The second experiment showed that the tracking accuracy was precise enough, meaning that the robot could autonomously track fine dust generation point.

In Korea, water spraying to suppress the dust during building dismantling operations has been done manually by human laborers, considered extremely dangerous since it often causes fatal accidents. Abroad, however, water spraying machines have been developed and used in construction sites instead of workers to prevent such serious industrial accidents. In this study, the first domestic water spraying machine is suggested. Since the spraying machine should have a novel dust tracking function, an optimal structure and mechanism should be designed to guarantee its motion performance. The motion for target tracking is achieved by the 2 DOF (Degrees of Freedom) structure comprising a linear and a rotary actuator. Then, the geometric analysis was performed to provide a sufficient kinematic workspace. Through the dynamic performance simulation, the optimal actuator capacities could be selected to generate an appropriate acceleration. The geometric and dynamic performance was evaluated by the extensive motion experiments. With this study, it is expected that an advanced water spraying machine can be developed only with domestic technologies to protect construction laborers from potentially dangerous accidents.