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THERE’S a revolution under way at building sites across Japan. Drones soar in the skies while scanning the ground. In the dirt below, huge diggers are working semi-autonomously, levelling land and digging ditches.

Californian firm Skycatch has supplied its quadcopter drones to more than 5000 building sites in Japan over the past three years. The sites are mostly in and around the Tokyo area and are run by Komatsu, the world’s second-largest building firm, as part of its Smart Construction project.

Now Skycatch is adding artificial intelligence to the mix, automating the process further and taking humans almost completely out of the loop. Soon it will hand over control of construction sites to smart, autonomous machines. “We’re looking at the vision of the automated job site,” says Skycatch’s Angela Sy.


Until Skycatch came on board, Komatsu was using human surveyors to map sites, a process that typically occupies a small team for a few days. With drones, it takes just 15 minutes to scan and create an accurate 3D map of the terrain.

The maps are then sent directly to Komatsu’s range of bulldozers and diggers, which proceed semi-autonomously with simple tasks, such as digging, levelling and piling up dirt. The machines have stereo cameras and GPS, and stay in contact with the drones so they know where they are on the site.

Skycatch is training machine learning systems on different aspects of the job. For example, it has used hundreds of labelled YouTube videos of diggers and other machines in action to train an AI model to recognise the different vehicles from above. Drones that can identify equipment, the stage of construction and potential safety hazards are already being rolled out at some Komatsu building sites now, says Skycatch CEO Christian Sanz. More will be deployed over the course of this year.

Eventually, the plan is for the drones to monitor the entire building site and all the vehicles from the air, and constantly update plans on the fly as necessary. The drones themselves will know what tasks they will be overseeing each day, and won’t need to be programmed every time, says Sanz. The software is learning to store its own plan of the proposed building schedule and will soon be able to update it and let the other machines know, all without human input. It will also be able to spot anomalies, such as delayed deliveries or spills, that need to be dealt with.

“Drones will be able to monitor the building site from the air and constantly update the plans”

“The machines will be able to act on their own, rather than just following a set of rules,” says Sy. Crucially, they will do all the computation themselves, rather than in the cloud, as many construction sites lack reliable Wi-Fi or cellular connections.

The move towards autonomous building sites is also being driven by a global shortage of construction labour. A survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in the UK last year found that more than 60 per cent of building firms were struggling to fill positions on sites.

As well as making the job more efficient, automation could reduce accidents. “There are about 10,000 reportable injuries around heavy equipment every year on construction sites just in the US,” says Noah Ready-Campbell of Built Robotics, another Californian start-up.

His firm is developing autonomous diggers and other vehicles that can work on a building site with almost no human intervention. Built Robotics’s driverless digger has been deployed at a few small building sites in the San Francisco Bay area. “If we can get people away from machines, we can create a safer job site,” he says.

Print-a-house Your next home could be built by robot. In China, a firm called Winsun claims to have 3D printed 10 entire buildings from concrete in just 24 hours. Meanwhile, in Russia, US start-up Apis Cor printed a small concrete house in a day, although it still needed a roof, doors and insulation added separately. Robots could help with more traditional looks too. Hadrian, a prototype robot made by Fastbrick Robotics in Perth, Australia, can lay 1000 bricks an hour. It works direct from a computer plan of a building and uses a strong glue instead of cement to hold the bricks together. Then there is SAM (Semi-Automated Mason), a robotic arm that can lay up to 3000 bricks a day, but still needs a human supervisor to load the bricks and another to help it clean up the cement. It can create complex and ornate patterns, says its developers, Construction Robotics of New York.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Drones control construction gear”