The Use of Drones in Construction

 The Cutting Edge No. 2

This is a collection of reports on the web from the last year or so on how and where drones have been used. There is probably a lot of other research and use going on that is not available and has not been reported, or is not on company or university websites, but I think this gives a fair idea of the state of play.

Drones are the big new thing in construction at the moment, but as always with new construction technology it is hard to get a good idea of how widespread their use, is or indeed how useful they are. Given the rapid uptake of BIM, tablets and apps in the US industry (see here and here) its not surprising that they also appear to be at the cutting edge with drones. That said, its hard to know how good the integrated systems from Skycatch and Droneview actually are, as there are no independent reports available so far. On the other hand, these companies have already got commercial products onto the market, and appear to be the first entrants.

It is worth noting that one effect of drones that monitor site progress against plans and schedules will be greatly increased transparency of project performance. I’ll discuss that topic in a later post, but there are some obvious implications of quality real-time information for clients, contractors and workers, though different in each case.

Crossrail

Drones are in regular use at Crossrail, a big project in London about to finish, although as far as I can tell they only have two in operation:

• Site inspections - close examination of high-risk areas, and speedy overviews of large sites, freeing up time for other tasks.
• Health and safety Induction – site plans can be quickly and efficiently updated to show where different works are taking place ensuring that operatives stay safe.
• Crane, tower and scaffold inspection – a much easier method of doing inspections, providing real-time footage to spot anomalies. This reduces site downtime and mitigates risks of personnel having to work at height.
• Site planning – overviews can be obtained quickly to inform planning sessions.
• 360° panoramas – a more immersive experience to enhance appreciation of potential hazards and site orientation.

Vinci

The French company claims to be a leader in the field, with four subsidiaries using drones:

• Omexom, the subsidiary that handles electricity grids, is using helicopter-style drones to observe the condition of pylons and insulator chains.
• At Eurovia drones are used in quarries to carry out topographic surveys and measure the likely reserves of the aggregate.
• Nymphea uses underwater drones, known as remote survey vehicles, to assess the condition of structures such as bridge caissons, either with visual cameras or with acoustic devices that measure the extent of corrosion on metal structures.
• Vinci Autoroutes uses drones that hover about 100m above the ground to build a 360 degree picture of the landscape along a particular road. The idea is to enable clients to see themselves from above, which they can do by linking to the drone’s cameras with their mobile phones or tablet computers.

Bechtel

The US contractor’s drone programme is the result of its decision in 2013 to team up with Skycatch a Californian start-up that attracted investment from Google, among others. The firm was founded to build drones for data collection on building sites. Christian Sanz, the founder and chief executive of Skycatch, said the aim was to have a fleet of drones continually flying over the works to capture real time information about their progress, prevent mistakes and detect unsafe situations.

Bechtel uses the technology to collect real-time environmental data such as air quality and temperature, monitor safety, survey difficult and inaccessible terrain and track real-time construction progress. The data collected can be stored in a cloud and viewed on site using handheld and desktop computers using the Skycatch dashboard. The technology was used at Bechtel’s three Curtis Island LNG projects in Australia, which are more or less complete and now in production.

Skycatch and Komatsu

 

Komatsu’s Smart Construction uses automated dozers and excavators. Komatsu partnered with Skycatch, and claim to have created the world’s first machine-to-machine automated construction equipment. The Smart Construction initiative uses Skycatch autonomous aerial robots for data collection, point cloud maps with 1 cm accuracy, visual intelligence and advanced data analysis. Skycatch UAVs scan job sites to capture imagery and automatically generate accurate 3D site data. This data is then compared with 3D drawings of the site to automatically calculate the area and volume of earth to be moved. The results are transmitted as instructions to Smart Construction machinery for fully autonomous work on the site.

Droneview

The company provides aerial imaging including 2D and 3D models to assist project managers, general contractors, site superintendents and engineers in tracking construction progress, measuring material stockpile volumes, improving environmental compliance, providing timely site surveys and real time mapping, improving safety and maintaining project schedules and budgets. Integrates with CAD and BIM software to facilitate collaboration and enhance real time decision-making.

They have a very interesting page on industry resources here. This lists 2016 conferences (all except one in the US, which was on insurance in London), a large number of software products, and drone insurance providers.

Image In Flight

Their website doesn’t have a lot of information, but on this page they have some good videos, including the Sacramento Kings' stadium in California in the next item. I assume this means they provided the imaging for the software system under development there.

University of Illinois

In August 2015, MIT Technology Review reported that drones were being used on the construction of the Sacramento Kings' stadium in California. Drone footage of progress on site was converted into a 3D model that could be compared to digital drawings to identify where progress was behind programme. The system was developed at the University of Illinois, where Mani Golparvar-Fard and his research team are developing GPS enabled quadcopters that will be computer-controlled to fully automate data collection, analysis and reporting of progress on the construction site. They have also developed a way for these robots to install cameras on elements of the site automatically.

In order to test and develop their system, the researchers were granted access to several construction sites around the U.S. being operated by Zachry Construction and Turner Construction, including their Sacramento Kings project. The University granted access to a current residence hall construction site, there is a video that shows the project on their campus at Urbana-Champaign.

Their system works this way: the quadcopters take photos and videos of the construction site, guided by a cloud-based computer program that can direct them to the rights spots, resulting in automatic data collection. The activities of the aerial robots are fully autonomous, including take off, navigation, landing and charging. The captured images and videos are then used to create an actual 3D model of the site under construction. The system compares this automatically generated 3D model to the as-designed 4D (3D plus time) Building Information Model, resulting in more frequent and complete progress monitoring information. The system also autonomously mounts battery-operated and WiFi-enabled surveillance cameras on different elements of the site to automatically capture videos of ongoing construction operations. Once the data is captured and transferred to the cloud, the system automatically detects and tracks workers and equipment in real time from the video feeds and categorizes activities of the resources automatically. The progress and activity monitoring results are visualized in a web-based, 4D augmented reality (D4AR) environment—a representation of the construction site in 4D with additional performance information superimposed on it. These D4AR models can also be made available to construction professionals through smartphones and tablets

Fraunhofer Institute

Christian Eschmann is a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Non-Destructive Testing IZFP in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he develops and adapts micro-aircraft for building inspections: “For a 20 by 80 meter wide façade, a test engineer needs about two to three days. Our octocopter (eight motors) needs three to four hours for this.” Cracks and other flaws can be digitally photographed in high resolution. If necessary, the octocopter can also be equipped with a thermal imaging camera, to check things such as building insulation.

The image yield is high, a15-minute flight can result in up to 1,200 photos. On the computer, the individual images are combined to create an overall picture, and the resulting 2D and 3D data models illustrate the visually imageable condition of the building structure. In the future, there will be software to delete any superfluous images. A complete software suite is planned for the future, including damage recognition, image processing, a database and documentation, as well as the automation of all operations, including stitching of individual images and identification of crack patterns. The octocopter took to the air in 2011 for its first inspection. So far, it has needed to be controlled manually. Eschmann and his colleagues are currently (in 2014) working on navigation sensors which will control the flying robot in the future. Following a predetermined pattern, these sensors will steer the octocopter along the façades, floor by floor, from one side to the other.

Costain

The UK contractor used a drone for surveying to capture detailed images of the construction path. Apart from surveying, the drone came in useful following a 2014 road traffic accident when it was flown in to record the incident scene and examine how local traffic management was set up.

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts about technology trends in the building and construction industry. The first is here.

Frontier Firms in Construction

Technology and Industry Structure

What evidence is there that there is an emerging global elite among construction firms, as argued in this previous post? This is not an easy question to answer because the evidence tends to be partial and rather anecdotal. However, two recent reports help shed some light on the issue.

A 2015 report from the OECD examined the performance of a “representative sample” of companies in 24 countries between 2001 and 2013, and discovered that the top 5% of them continued to increase their productivity while the other 95% were almost stagnant. They called the top firms “frontier firms”, and they identified a widening gap between these firms and the laggards.

Their analysis was an at a very high level of aggregation, using the manufacturing and services sectors of the economy (at the two digit SIC level). Manufacturing frontier firms had an increase in labour productivity of 2.8% a year compared to 0.6% a year for the rest, and in services the gap was even wider, with the frontier firms increasing productivity by 3.6% compared to 0.4% for the laggards. This productivity data came from another 2015 OECD study called The Future of Productivity.

 

The frontier firms had a number of key characteristics. They were frequently part of multinational groups that benchmark themselves against other frontier companies, and technological innovations at the frontier spread more rapidly across countries than they do within them. These global firms use patents more, are more technologically intensive and, significantly, their investments in technology are more effective in enabling their workers and reinventing their business models. Also, many of these firms have developed internal capabilities that are exclusive, or difficult for other firms to copy.

The OECD researchers found for firms at the productivity frontier, new innovations are the key to their competitive advantage. The strength of these global frontier firms is their capacity to innovate, which increasingly requires more than just investing in R&D and implementing technology. It requires the capacity to combine technological, organizational, and human capital improvements, which the OECD calls “knowledge based capital”. From this perspective, the main source of the current productivity slowdown is not a slowing in the rate of innovation by the most globally advanced firms, but rather a slowing of the pace at which innovations spread through the economy from frontier firms to others. The gap between the frontier firms and laggards will therefore continue to widen, and the report argues for public policies to increase technology diffusion to counteract this, most of which will be too politically difficult to implement in any meaningful way (like deregulating services in the EU).

How does this apply to construction? First, construction is classed as a service industry, so the gap between the frontier and the rest is probably wide, even extremely wide. Second, the fragmented nature of the industry and preponderance of small firms with limited technical and knowledge resources will restrict innovation. This is compounded by the significantly better quality of managers at larger firms (the subject of another OECD paper). Third, many or most firms in the industry will not have the capital to invest in developing the internal capabilities or business models that are required to move toward the frontier.

The OECD argues investment in innovation should extend beyond technology to include skills, software, and organisational know-how (i.e. managerial quality), and innovation depends on the bundling of these investments. For many small and medium sized contractors this too would be well beyond their current plans or objectives, which might extend to some basic BIM capability or supply chain integration. Generally, because the difference in size between the small and medium firms in construction and the largest contractors is so large all these effects will be magnified, and the gap between the frontier firms and the rest may well be much larger than the averages found by the OECD researchers.

A few examples follow. Two global are contractors and they demonstrate the extent of the gap argued above, with the resources and scale to research, develop and test the wide range of software and hardware now available. The third is a start-up that has major firms as partners and sponsors who are backing a technology innovator, and who would be expected to deploy the technology once proven. All three have created internal innovation labs and fabrication shops to experiment with emerging technologies and create custom software tools, and have built significant R&D teams and partnerships.

Skanska and its partners are developing wireless monitoring of buildings, using sensors to record data on temperature and vibration, and embedding sensors into roadways in a pilot project for self-driving buses and trucks in Sweden. The company is using drones for surveying and is testing the use of robots and concrete printing, and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and barcodes on products and components. They are extending their use of 3D BIM models to VR, operations management and FM using software developed in-house. In 2010 Skanska launched an Innovation Grant Program to provide employees support to partner with local universities, which led to funding for their idea of Flying Factories for offsite manufacturing.

Fluor Corporation have a long history of nuclear EPC and in 2011 became the majority shareholder in NuScale Power, a small modular reactor (SMR) technology developer. These SMRs are a factory built modular electricity generating system. The company expects to submit its US Design Certification Application in December 2016 and to be fully licensed by 2020. The first generating plant could be operating, in Utah, in 2024.

MX3D is a Dutch start-up working with partners such as ArcelorMittal, ABB and Autodesk. In 2014 they invented a six axis 3D printing robot by equipping an industrial robot with an advanced welding machine, and developed the software to control it. They can 3D print metals and resin in mid-air, without the need for support structures, and are printing a steel footbridge across a canal in Amsterdam as a demonstration project of what they call digital fabrication. The videos are very cool.