Computer assisted glass mosaic tiling automation

Artistic mosaic tiling applications have been used in all periods of time since the oldest ages. Nowadays the mosaics, mostly called glass mosaics, are manufactured in square forms and applied by the factories. Tiling of the mosaics on a grid base is done manually in factories to reflect a predetermined design. In this study a fully-automated system has been developed for tiling the mosaics without human intervention. All the phases, starting from a digital photo, through to the tiling of mosaics, up to the packaging of panels in the production, are performed without any manual intervention in a continuous flow. The developed system has a modular structure, so the number of modules may be increased according to the desired speed and the number of colors. A software package has been developed in order to process the image to be tiled, to convert the colors of the image to the colors of mosaics, to perform simulation before the actual production and to control the various stepper motors, relays and sensors on the machine during manufacturing. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.