Feature
Aligning real and virtual construction From drone-gathered site data to augmented reality (AR), advanced technologies are bringing new perspectives on real-world environments and works in progress, writes Randall S Newton
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he construction industry in time and costs,” says Fujitoshi the gathered imagery; and a cloud intelligence platform, for turning imagery and Japan has a problem: the Takamura, CTO of Komatsu. scans into actionable data. shrinking birth rate is creating One example of the data processing is a shortage of skilled construc- Eyes inside the project tion workers. So heavy equipment manu- “We are a data company that happens to in creating topographic charts. There can facturer Komatsu has created a Smart use drones to collect data,” says Patrick be no trees, shrubs and so on in the final Construction division, building automat- Stuart, director of products at Skycatch. data. Removing all the flora by hand, ed excavators and dozers. The robotic The company’s combination of drones, using a computer workstation, can take equipment pushes dirt without a human mobile apps and cloud processing turns hours or weeks, depending on the scale of driver, following excavation plans with raw data from the drones into usable the project. The Skycatch cloud platform great accuracy. The automated heavy information for autonomous equipment does it in minutes, scaling to use as many equipment is so fast and precise that or for use by engineers in existing CAD or processors as available to complete the task. The software can export to common existing methods of ground-based data BIM workflows. gathering (surveying, ground-based For example, a utilities engineer can AEC data formats for CAD and BIM. Running robotic heavy equipment scanning) cannot keep up. monitor how utilities are being installed To tackle this issue, Komatsu Smart in near real time. By tracking progress so and monitoring construction progress Construction worked with San Francisco- closely, the engineer can see if and when are only two of the most obvious uses of based start-up Skycatch to improve data a design change must be made, then take UAVs. One Skycatch client started using the technology after ground had collection and processing. Skycatch been broken and foundation work specialises in industrial applications had begun on a campus-sized for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles BIM no longer has to be only the (UAVs), commonly known as design/engineering model; it can be project. Management started by using drones. the constantly updated record of Skycatch technology to gather curNow, whenever Komatsu Smart construction rent site data, comparing it to the Construction vehicles are on site, project design. On the first day, they are guided by one or more they found a $400,000 slab of condrones gathering terrain data. Komatsu refers to the resulting workflow measurements and decide what to do. crete was eight inches misaligned. Work as the world’s first machine-to-machine What took days or weeks with manual stopped; an investigation revealed flaws in automated construction system. data gathering and oversight can be now the original survey that echoed through the design phase and into construction. If Skycatch’s drones photograph job sites, done in minutes. capturing imagery and automatically gen“We give people in construction some- not found so quickly, a $400,000 concrete erating 3D site data. The data can be quick- thing they never had before – eyes into an mistake could have ballooned, costing sevly laid over site drawings or models to entire construction project,” says Stuart. eral times more than that sum, depending automatically calculate area and volume of Traditionally, construction managers on when traditional construction overearth to be moved. gathered information from a variety of sight methods spotted it. “I use the Skycatch data on the site daily The results are transmitted as instruc- sources and methods, from discussions tions to Smart Construction machinery for on-site to marked-up plans, to email and if not hourly,” says Victoria Julian, a superintendent for DPR Construction. “We can fully autonomous work on the site. Think phone exchanges. of it as drone-to-phone construction man“It is like a phone tree game,” says take the Skycatch plan, colour-code it, agement. Stuart. “Usually the data is late and not mark it up, label it and use it for logistics planning, daily, weekly, monthly – whatev“Once we have efficiently planned the very accurate.” work amount, [clients] can use the The Skycatch technology stack com- er we need.” “Everybody who sees this is amazed by Komatsu machinery. Smart Construction prises three layers: the drone hardware can successfully plan the efficient system and control technology (Skycatch sells it. Loves it. And is using it. It’s really an from the beginning to the end so clients drones but also works with other incredible tool that I don’t want to have to save significant amount of workload, brands); apps for data review and editing do without on the next big project.”
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Summer 2017 special edition
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