Development of tiling automation for custom mosaic design

•This paper presents the development of a tiling automation to support custom mosaic design from a digital image.•The system follows a product flow concept that tesserae are sorted first to form a row prior to be assembled to a mosaic.•The complexity of tile sorting is handled in two steps: acquiring tiles needed for a row and rearranging the tiles according to the order.•Hardware and software have been developed to illustrate the proposed tiling automation.

Mosaic is the art of design creation from tesserae, and for custom mosaic design the individual tesserae are assigned to certain positions unlike forming a random pattern. The variety of designs makes it difficult for automatic tile assembly; consequently, manual assembly is typically found in practice. This paper presents the development of a tiling automation to support custom mosaic design from uniform size square tiles. The system follows a product flow concept that the tesserae are sorted first to form a row prior to be assembled to a mosaic moving slowly on a conveyor. It allows a simple point-to-point movement for assembly. The complexity shifting from toolpath generation to tile sorting is handled in two steps: acquiring tiles needed for a row and rearranging the tiles according to the order. A shortest distance criterion has been applied for determining dispensing sequence. Hardware and software have been developed to illustrate the proposed tiling automation.