Case study
Introduction
Smart Construction is a department within Komatsu that focuses on delivering an interconnected software and hardware package to digitalize the work that concerns machines, material, and people active on earthmoving projects. This family of solutions facilitates the collection and analysis of jobsite data based on IoT devices and operational information.
One of those solutions within this family is Smart Construction Dashboard; a web-based viewer of survey data, which is gathered from a broad range of survey tools: GNSS rovers, total station measurements, UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle, ~drone) based point clouds, laser scanners, intelligent machines’ as-built data…
Smart Construction Dashboard allows the users to get remote access to the project, follow up on progress, calculate volume and communicate actions in a 3D environment.
Data Collection
As our Smart Construction Dashboard displays point cloud data, we are always looking out for all kinds of different systems providing this accurate data.
Our preferred tool? That would be the UAV as it keeps the employees away from safety hazards and makes surveying your progress fast and easy.
Experience proves, however, that a UAV is an excellent tool to provide valuable insight but is lacking in several ways as well. For example, there are still many areas that have restricted airspace, which prevents our advisory experts or customers from performing UAV flights.
Therefore we started looking into alternatives that allow us to obtain localized point cloud data, which is easy to capture and provides qualitative data, usable for correct volume calculations in the earthmoving business. And this is the point where we started looking into the Beemobile solution.
Implementation Beemobile
We first saw the Beemobile being presented at the Digital Construction fair in Brussels back in 2019.
At that time, their presentation on the targeted usage of the system was already music to our ears: bridging the gap between the stationary use of laser scanners and the highly specialized service of bringing in a mobile mapping system. When we were rolling out our Smart Construction services on a jobsite in early 2021 and came across a jobsite where UAV flights turned out to be troublesome with our pilot license (A2 in the new European regulation), we opted to contact Beemobile to give their system a go.
Read More
