Artificial Intelligence (AI) is creeping into many applications with machine learning and image recognition leading the charge. While it’s obvious in the automotive industry, it is not so obvious in construction. You often have to ask tech companies if they’re using any machine learning under the hood. It’s hidden from sight, from competitors and just beginning to be leveraged.
Where construction AI stands is a patchwork of uses that are now being mashed up to reveal the potential of where we’re headed. What do you get if you take a robot, mount LIDAR, and HD cameras and feed that to a deep-learning algorithm?
Ask Doxel, a startup that tracks progress on a construction site.
It has managed to train its system to identify ductwork and wiring conduits to track progress, measure quantities and inspect quality (model to field deviations) that a human eye may not detect. Then it combines the budget information to accurately report percentage completion in real-time.
For many people AI is a human replacement, or augmented robot, but actually it’s a combination of many tools: cognitive computing, machine learning, deep learning, predictive application programming interfaces, natural language processing, image recognition, and speech recognition.
These AI technologies lend themselves to solutions for construction in the office and field leveraging many areas:
- Satellite imagery for geo-analytics
- Weather forecasting
- Building automation and energy management
- Automated workforce scheduling
- Workflow and project management
- Intelligent recruiting and human resources systems
- Procurement management
- Personalized tutoring and adaptive learning
- Converting paperwork into digital assets
- Employee expense management
- Contract analysis
- Predictive maintenance, just to name a few.
Add these functions to your heavy equipment, drones and your enterprise system andyou’ll increase productivity, improve quality and lower overall risk. On time, on budget and high quality. Your project owner may no longer have to pick just two.
Check out Doxel in action in the video below:
by Carol Hagen, president, Hagen Business Systems Inc.
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