According to the Architect's Newspaper, software company HoloBuilder has partnered with the robotics firm Boston Dynamics to create a semi-autonomous dog-like robot to document under-construction projects. The four-legged machine is the first semi-manually trained robot to walk a pre-determined route while capturing and documenting job-site progress. The robot is controlled by a user’s phone app.
Contractor Hensel Phelps has been testing out Spot on the $1.2 billion San Francisco International Airport Terminal 1 project. A Spot unit walks through the site capturing imagery, which is then fed into HoloBuilder’s machine learning-powered SiteAI, which provides automated construction tracking and other data.
Documenting construction sites currently is a tedious task that takes away time from project staff that could otherwise focus on other aspects of construction, safety, and design. It can only be done with relatively limited regularity because of the demands.
With Spot, project managers predict that they could capture updates of their sites as frequently as twice a day with all the 360 imagery being automatically organized and analyzed. Because of Spot’s greater consistency against humans, the photos are also more useful as tools and the collected data is more actionable due to its regularity.
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