B4 - Eduardo Borja - Group E

             From the topics given, Maria and I thought that Robotics in construction was quite interesting. It is something that is starting to develop and can actually be the future of construction. From our research we established that there are many aspects of construction that could benefit from robotics. We started out with a broad idea on what our project could be but decided to research robotics that will actually build a vertical structure.

            The category of robotics in general is an interesting topic and is one that definitely will evolve in the future. The fact that we are aspiring Engineers makes this topic really interesting. This project was chosen mainly to analyze the effects that robotics will have in the construction industry. It will be interesting to compare and contrast what robots can contribute vs. what humans contribute to the construction industry. I believe it could also be interesting to determine which human disciplines could be affected due to the introduction of robotics in the construction industry. Also, I believe one of the greatest effects robots will have in the construction industry is the fact that they will help speed up mundane and repetitive processes like laying concrete blocks or bricks.

            One aspect of intelligent buildings could be optimizing the work force. One benefit that could be huge with robotics is the fact that these machines could take over low-value, repetitive, mundane work. Human job force can be efficiently redirected to high priority work in order to have a successful facility.

            Since this topic involves a lot of research and not many robots have been implemented in industry, it is hard to obtain conclusive results. Some robots are prototypes and have done small projects while other robots are still just ideas. Most of the information we could obtain will be some sort of speculation. For example, it can be said that some robots will eventually take over human jobs but it is hard to say actually how many jobs would actually be taken.

Resources:

1.     http://www.gizmag.com/hadrian-brick-laying-robot-fastbrick/38239/

2.     http://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/article/robotics_automating_construction_and_building

3.     http://buildingrobotics.com/blog/the-year-ahead-intelligent-building-trends-to-watch-in-2016/

Comments:

Mohammed Alqallaf: Mohammed, I found your topic really interesting. An additional two floors is certainly a major addition. The benefits of using BIM are getting stronger and stronger in my opinion. The cost schedule would be something quite tedious if Revit wasn’t there to help you guys out. Good luck with your senior design!

Karan Sagar Sinha: Karan, the topic you chose I believe is quite interesting and will definitely have a great impact in the construction industry. If a machine can print onsite any design, there will be a great satisfaction regarding the ease of constriction of the structure. Good luck with your project!

B4 - Group D - Maria Ayon

Robots have been around for many years with the purpose of completing tasks in almost every discipline, including housekeeping, space exploration, delivery services, medicine, care-taking, etc. Most recently, robots have been introduced to the construction industry with the purpose of making the construction process more efficient, as well as proving safety. I chose to do a research paper to study these robots and see what their impact is the industry as well as the impact they might have in the future.

Powered machines have been around since the industrial revolution, facilitating tasks of construction workers. Nowadays, new technologies are allowing for these machines to run without a human operator. Its purpose is not to eliminate all man power from construction sites, but to decrease the construction time of a building, allowing for a better efficiency and cost. For instance, robot SAM (Semi-Automated Mason), built by Construction Robotics, is a brick laying robot, which made his debut in the construction world in 2015. SAM needs a crew of three, including a mason and a tender, in order to apply mortar to the brick, setting it and moving along a face predetermined by a laser. Although the robot is not able to operate on its own, with the help of its crew, it is capable of laying a brick every 20 to 25 seconds. Scott Peters, cofounder of Construction Robotics says that SAM’s purpose is to leverage human’s jobs, not replace them, where a mason can lay 300-500 bricks per day, while SAM can lay about 800-1,200 bricks per day. This will not only decrease construction time in the field, but it will also decrease construction errors. A door opening designed to be located a certain distance from the corner of the building may not be exactly be placed there in reality. Robots have been designed to perfectly built by the use of sensors and coding.

In the future, with the combination of 3D printers and robotic fabrication, buildings could be constructed faster, saving money. Led by BIM, these models will be able to mold, assemble, weld, polish the metallic structure. This will allow to design for more complex-shaped structures easier. This is an idea that is been looking into, yet not elaborated. This may come as a challenge to developers of these great robotic ideas since their main purpose is to reducing cost and time, yet they may not be accounting for the numerous amounts of jobs robots might take over.

Sources:

http://www.dezeen.com/2015/10/23/robotic-construction-3d-printing-future-wolf-d-prix-interview/

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-times-as-many-bricks-as-construction-workers/

http://www.construction-robotics.com/

Comments:

Sam Joyce Comment

Maq Alqallaf Comment

B3 - Group C - Sean Coffey

What are the possible future advantages of Revit/BIM?

I found that there are various ways in which BIM is likely to improve in the future. In many ways the future advantages have been implemented but they are not in standard use but are foreseen to become standard, while there are other potential interoperability and unutilized capabilities of BIM that may exist in the future depending on how technology advances, the level of adoption and the economic support for those advances to become mainstream.

The currently existing advantages that are under utilized are the development and use of as built models for the future operation, maintenance, renovation and eventual demolition of the building, full interoperability of BIM with other specialty design programs, support of the complete design of a building in single BIM programs, provide quicker analysis of building systems, support modular and lean construction through prefabrication, track construction components on the site and have a real time updating schedule based on feedback from site sensors , the viewability of all building systems at the same time in a “stitched together” model, the direct use of a BIM model to fabricate the components needed, the use of virtual or augmented reality to facilitate building construction, Integrated Project Development will become standard.

As all of these capabilities that have been developed during the construction of building and other structures or products become mainstream. These future advantages of BIM in development will endow construction savings, efficiency, optimization, learning, quality, speed, safety and accuracy benefits. These will be realized by optimizing the construction process to reduce waste, minimize errors in components and schedule, limit the number of onsite activities and crew interferences, better record data about the construction process, streamline delivery, and require less work on site to assemble modular components. These will mostly occur due to leveraging what is learned from collected data and process automation through more advanced software to design a comprehensive and well informed concept to design to construction to operation work flow and feedback strategy.

Future advantages that may be possible with BIM but questionably feasible due to economics, lack of adoption or physical limitations such as computing power are the use of 3D printing to perform custom construction, use of drones or robots for construction, the automation of building systems design,

These plausible next generation advantages of BIM could increase the ability of BIM to develop custom and unique building features, automate the design, construction and operation process, use collected data and resulting performance information to optimize future construction and design, and reduce the need for human labor to construct a building.

Drones could be used to monitor construction progress through monitoring the proper installation of components and support the development of as built models. Robots could be used to help construct the structure, removing the need for human labor and performing hazardous tasks. Both the drones robots could increase the accuracy and speed and reduce the cost with which the structure is constructed.

Automated and comprehensive analyses of an entire building throughout its lifecycle could identify potential problems in the design that will unnecessarily shorten the life of the building or are non optimum. These analyses could show the designer where to pay attention to improve a building design and present the data needed to make the decision. They would effectively remove all of the tedious task that result from designing a building and leave the complex, intuitive decision making up to the engineer. If programs eventually gain the capability to make those tough decisions then programs could automatically design entire buildings or building systems so that only a check by an experienced and capable engineer is required to determine the functionality of the design.

Lastly, the digitization of codes that automatically modify families into components that meet the standards and requirements for location the model will be built. For instance the Canadian and US International Building codes have slight differences in how far out the handrails in stairwells should extend past the end of the stairs. Canada requires 11.75 inches and the US uses 12 inches. Based on the location the model is set to be built in, only stairwell handrails designs that meet the requirements would be importable into the model or the handrail family could be programmed to modify the handrail extension length to meet the requirements. This seems entirely possible, but because of the huge variety of building codes and their differences, the process to to understand the code would have to be automatic, taking advantage of text recognition software, language understanding artificial intelligence, and .link the output to the BIM code parameter input regions. This technology is already possible but is not fully reliable and expensive to produce.

References

Volk, Rebekha, Julian Stengel, and Frank Schultman. "Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Existing Buildings — Literature Review and Future Needs." Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Existing Buildings. Automation in Construction, Mar. 2014. Web. 26 Jan. 2016.

Yoders, Jeff. "5 Tech Trends Transforming BIM/VDC." Building Design + Construction. N.p., 23 Dec. 2014. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Comments

@Samuel Boyce

http://ae-510-ay15-16.blogspot.com/2016/01/b3-samuel-boyce-group-a.html?showComment=1453876670088#c3445327528887797374

I think you are right about most of the future pitfalls of BIM modeling. Many of them exist today and will only get worse such as trusting that the computer program has done the correct thing and increasing complexity of the programs and creations of the programs. Somewhere there is likely to be an error that has been missed since class detections have not been reduced to zero. If were stop questioning whether or not the design has been done right then we will need to rethink how we design buildings. Many firms push the software to make profit and may not perform all the checks necessary and end up under designing building components. It gets scary when those building components that are faultily designed are crucial to making the building safe or keeping it standing. Another one of my fears is that the program operations will become so complicated that the usual engineer's check stops working. This could lead to a failure and there would not be easy way to check for an error so fewer companies would bother to put in the effort to do the check.

@Christian A in Alexis Akins Post

http://ae-510-ay15-16.blogspot.com/2016/01/b3-group-c-alexis.html?showComment=1453877679281#c7001707379768372946

I am very excited to hear that this technology is becoming a reality due to its abilities to enhance communication. It can perform all the tasks that you mentioned and maybe more depending on how the program becomes integrated with other functionalities. Like was show during the presentation the owner, architect, or engineer could go to the site even before construction starts and have the building model augment reality so that they can get a feel for what the building will actually be like. The communication from an offsite location could be upgrade with translation abilities so that language barriers wont get in the way of real time communication and decision making. Additionally, the owner could don a VR headset and take a virtual tour of the building which allows them to inspect the building model in a way that they are more familiar with. There are so many uses. I think this will be the next big game changer that will really push forward collaboration and communication of construction project stakeholders.

B1: Group C - Sean Coffey

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a thing of the present, there are numerous tech companies that have their own AI and actively use their AI’s to perform services for the public or commercial users. So it should not be surprising that Google is continually developing and producing its own form of artificial intelligence. But unlike other tech companies, Google has made a version of it’s artificial intelligence software public so that researchers, students, and companies can modify it for new tasks, upgrade it to make it more efficient and intelligent and learn from it. Google’s decision to crowd source the development of its artificial intelligence has given the company some valuable feedback that it would not have received or been able to develop otherwise. Google did not expressedly require feedback from those that chose use its AI software, but does expect some feedback for enabling the industry with its software. This also shows that AI development is no small task and even a company as big as Google cannot hire all the specialists that exist.

The artificial intelligence technology that Google creates is being worked on and implemented to provide more intelligent, improved services like Google search, voice search, and numerous android applications. The software is constantly tested with the data received from Google users that permit the use of their data to improve Google’s AI software. The AI software learns and optimizes itself based on the data and Google programmers use the data to teach, test and improve the software. The results of this can be seen in how quickly Google’s voice search has improved to understand Google users speaking in different languages and in with different accents and / or dialects. In two years the error rate for voice searches fell from 25% to 8%. [1] Considering the difficulty of this task, that is an amazing improvement driven by data analytics and efficient program architecture.

[1] Gershgorn, Dave. "How Google Aims To Dominate Artificial Intelligence." Popular Science. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2016. < http://www.popsci.com/google-ai >

Robotics

The advance in robotics has come relatively quickly but has not really completely caught up with science fiction and implement in many industries. One of the few industries that heavily relies on robotics is space travel and exploration. There are many probes and rovers that are often too far away from earth to be remotely controlled and have to autonomous to a certain extent. This largely depends on how far away the science vehicle is away from earth. The mars science laboratory rover named Curiosity is only autonomous at navigation and relies on human input to decide whether or not to perform some tests and experiments. [2] On the other hand the New Horizons probe that flew by pluto last year was completely autonomous during its flyby. The reason for this difference is because a round trip communication with the New Horizons probe would take about 9 hours while a similar communication with mars would take 45 minutes. Because of the extreme communication lag, the need for communication between the probe and earth had to be reduced and the nature of how fast the probe would pass pluto also made it imperative to make use of every second by programming the actions of the probe. This autonomy lead to the probe being designed to perform the entire flyby, full system checks and error corrections autonomously. [3] These are huge accomplishments and show how the automation of vehicles, at least in space, can improve the performance of a vehicle and operate in relatively hazardous environments. They prove the validity of developing future autonomous vehicles to perform mining and construction tasks. [4, 5]

[2] "Spacecraft Systems and Components." New Horizons. NASA, n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2016.

< http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-259 >

[3] "NASA'S Mars Curiosity Debuts Autonomous Navigation." NASA'S Mars Curiosity Debuts Autonomous Navigation. NASA, 27 Aug. 2013. Web. 12 Jan. 2016.

< http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-259 >

[4] "Building a Lunar Base with 3D Printing." Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. NASA, n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2016.

< http://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/building-a-lunar-base-with-3d-printing/ >

[5] "RMC - About the Competition." NASA’s Robotic Mining Competition. NASA, 17 Apr. 2015. Web. 12 Jan. 2016.

< http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/centers/kennedy/technology/nasarmc/about >

Comments:

Bryan,

I found all three of your articles very interesting and inspiring, but I wonder how long the industry will take to advance to making these processes feasible on an everyday basis. There are many roadblocks, such as capability limitations of the 3D printers that you have mentioned and those that have been mentioned in class, that will need to overcome before that will happen. I also see it being hard for the 3D printed building industry to grow without the development of 3D printers that are reusable. I do not see the industry developing large, unique 3D printers that can only be used for 1 building design. This is approach would be economically infeasible and limit the construction speed. This would favor the use of small 3D printers like those used to make the steel bridge in Amsterdam. Because of their smaller size, the printers could be quickly produced, easily replaced,  more capable of constructing different building designs, and readily collaborate with other printer types to produce composite structures. If this were to happen in the future, it would all but revolutionize how buildings are constructed.

Redus,

I also researched artificial intelligence and found an example of how Google has incorporated artificial intelligence in its applications to the application created by Dulight to assist the blind. Google actually uses artificial intelligence in a lot of its applications to perform tasks like translating text in a picture from one language to another, understanding speech, and recognizing the people in pictures taken and upload to the cloud. There are numerous other examples and it is amazing and somewhat unsettling what can be accomplished with the use of artificial intelligence.