A construction site is a complex organism. Many small processes have to run simultaneously for a building to be completed. For many years, the construction industry has been working intensively on digitalization solutions to link the entire value chain of planning, production, ordering, delivery, and assembly, thus also creating an identical digital copy of the physical construction project. For this, close-meshed documentation is required to complement photographic and scanned records with the important temporal component of the construction progress.
Construction expert Rhomberg Bau GmbH, interdisciplinary construction planner convex ZT GmbH and the Vienna-based research center VRVis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung Forschungs-GmbH have now joined forces to take an entirely new approach to fully automated construction site documentation: In the " Spot:On" project, the three Austrian companies are jointly developing a solution that uses the dynamic robot "Spot" from Boston Dynamics to generate an autonomous permanent record of a dynamically changing construction site in real-world scenarios. The goal is for the robotic dog to continuously capture its environment in 3D point clouds and located imagery in a fully automated and autonomous manner, without interfering with construction site operations, thereby capturing the emerging structure in immersive 360° panoramas. Thanks to point clouds, images, telemetry, and other sensor data recorded in real-time, it is possible to track at any point in time when and how each construction step was carried out: the perfect "digital clone" of a building. Over the next few years, the three companies will work together to achieve this unprecedented milestone in the construction industry.
Documentation is of great importance in the construction industry, as pure photographic documentation has long since ceased to be sufficient for this purpose. Therefore, the "Spot:On" project has set itself the task of further expanding the possibilities of 3D recordings and extending them by adding immersive and temporal components. This is an essential basis for smart reconstructions, future reconstruction work, or climate change-related renovation activities. To gain even more benefit from the construction scans, the Hololens 2 AR glasses from Microsoft are being used to create a further interface between planning and construction reality by incorporating augmented reality.
As part of "Spot:On", the project partners produced a teaser video showing their vision and giving the public an insight into the current status and the tools used: Dynamic robot technology (Spot) and augmented reality glasses (Hololens 2). The video introduces these using a simple work assignment for Spot: Across rough construction site terrain, the robot dog transports AR glasses from the planner to the investor so that the latter can take a look at the finished building using an augmented reality hologram. The video shows how agile the robot dog is and how naturally it fits into the construction site processes. This is the starting point for the three companies' joint project to thoroughly intertwine digitalization, augmented reality, robotics technologies, and engineering for the construction site of the future. To be continued!
Together with Rhomberg Bau GmbH and convex ZT GmbH, VRVis is developing a concept for the use of Boston Dynamic's robot dog "Spot" for autonomous, immersive construction site documentation.
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