By: RACHAEL BROWN
Building services engineer Daniel Messina is combining his passions for robotics and automation to take some of the grunt work out of construction processes.
From construction to completion, a building design can travel far from the initial idea. Taking on-site scans as work progresses can track these deviations and help course-correct if needed, but for engineer Daniel Messina, there are problems with that whole process.
In his first month on the job, Messina, a building services engineer with Arup, was taken to “appreciate how things look out on-site”, and given the task to 3D scan the space for design documentation.
At the time, that process meant setting a scanner on a tripod, pressing a button and leaving it for 10 minutes – and then relocating it a number of times to repeat the process with each new location. It’s not a hard task, but it is time consuming and tedious.
“I just thought, ‘Surely there must be a better way of doing this?’. It just sounded mad to me that someone would stay out on site for two days just doing this,” he told create.
The gears in his mind started turning, and he spotted an opportunity to combine his background in robotics and interest in automation to find a solution. This led him to creating Hermes the scanning robot, and receiving a spot on create’s list of Most Innovative Engineers for his efforts.
Capturing the details
Messina was able to explore this idea with support from Arup University, the firm’s own internal intelligence hub.
Hermes comprises a scanner mounted on an aluminium chassis, which contains all the electronics, hardware, motors and gears needed for the robot to move around. The idea is that someone plans a path, and the robot follows the path to scan at various intervals. Hermes uses LiDAR to map the space in 2D, and simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) to stitch those images into a 3D representation of the space.
Messina said that while it still needs a person to mark the robot’s path, that effort is now condensed into one chunk, rather than spread across a day or two.
“The required time for a person is still the same, but it alleviates the stop-start nature of the other method for someone to be more productive and conduct processing or analysis instead,” Messina said.
“They can be more strategic and productive with their time.”
Capturing a site’s condition in 3D detail is very valuable in contexts like site verification during construction.
“What we find is, it’s common for on-site scans to deviate from the drawings,” said Messina.
“Over the life cycle of the building, those deviations become more and more drastic, to a point where the drawings might no longer be valid.”
Messina found applications in other areas as well. Real estate, for example, could use scans for property fit-outs when a new tenant moves into a building and makes changes. He also sees benefits for asset maintenance, disaster relief or search and rescue, as well as mining.
Read more >> https://www.createdigital.org.au/automation-construction-industry-small-robots-big-things/
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