Automation to reduce error and improve quality

Taylor Woodrow is developing a solution to bring the factory to site to achieve a better result on paving schemes, engineering manager Daniel Ferneyhough told GIRI members last month. He explained how the search for a safer, cleaner, more efficient solution to cutting paving resulted in the idea for a ‘factory in a box’.

The Cut’n Move was developed by Danish robotics company Odico and is currently being trialled in Derby as part of the Intellipave solution that Taylor Woodrow has been working on for the last five years. 

Daniel explained that Intellipave came about because of the inherent disadvantages of on-site cutting of paving slabs. “We deliver a lot of large-scale urban realm schemes where we lay a significant amount of paving of various types, and this always needs to be cut. It’s noisy, dusty, and disruptive, so much so that it is written into some of our contracts that we can’t cut on site. There are also health and safety risks from silica dust, manual handling and heavy lifting, and from an environmental perspective, it creates a slurry that goes into the drainage network.”

On-site manual cutting is also inefficient. “We worked out that for each three-person gang, one person spends one day a week cutting. And from a quality perspective, each slab often takes two cuts, some might go wrong and be wasted, and we’re not optimising the slabs. Cut slabs are rarely reused, therefore it creates waste. It’s also not inclusive. Some people can’t physically do it and we have a massive skills gap in the trade for laying paving.”

Around five years ago Eurovia put out a call for ideas via its Eureka innovation platform. “There has always been a big drive to get our paving cut to size before it is delivered, but the tolerances we build to just aren’t there. So we put forward a solution that would see us lay all our paving units that don’t require cutting and leave the voids out. We would then take a scanning solution, scan the voids, and in theory, develop a ‘factory in a box’ within the compound which would cut the slabs for our gangs to lay.” 

This Intellipave concept received Innovate UK funding and Eurovia put together a partnership to deliver the project, including The Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre at Sheffield University and Loop Technology, specialists in vision systems and robots. The aim was to automate the cutting of the paving centrally off site rather than on site manually, and Loop Technology worked on developing a 3D scanning solution that could be easily operated by an engineer on site to capture the whole scene, process the date, and transpose it into usable robot language to create the patterns required by the site.

The project envisaged two machines, one doing straight cuts, the other doing curves and complex cuts, which would be trialled on site in phase two of the project. However, the discovery that Danish firm Odico was developing exactly that concept changed the plan. “Odico’s Cut’n Move solution is about the size of a horse box. It houses a robot arm that can make straight cuts. The solution recycles all its water and has a screen that prevents dust and noise escaping, so we can park it on our site and use it without disruption. And it cut slabs and paving stones from 10x10cm up to 62.5x80cm and from 4cm thick to 16.5cm.

“Cut’n Move is now in a six-month trial in Derby, and once we can demonstrate that it works, we will bring everything together in one final solution.”

Daniel estimates that around 90% of Taylor Woodrow’s paving operation is straight-cut flagstones. The Cut’n Move robot is operated by a simple tablet interface and can cut 1mm slivers from a paving slab, giving Taylor Woodrow a level of precision and factory finish that isn’t possible by hand. It is also quicker and more repeatable. 

“The next step is to get the scanning solution up and running. Right now, we are getting around 20 cuts a day, feeding two gangs, and the solution is cost neutral on the Derby trial. However, this is only about 10-15% optimisation. It could be feeding five gangs, so there is a lot of process optimisation to do, but even as it is we are already seeing significant benefits, and we are also giving our clients a much better product.”

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