Thanks to problems with elevator-cable girth, weight and sway, supertall-building specialists often get hung up on the ropes when designing towers taller than 500 or 600 meters.
In one of the biggest investments in automation by the rental industry, United Rentals on Dec. 17 announced that it has entered into a partnership with 5D Robotics to install automation systems on equipment in its rental yards.
The 2015 JBKnowledge Construction Technology Report states that that less than half of the companies that responded could meet Europe’s soon-to-be-implemented requirement of delivering as-built BIM models of all construction projects. “Companies would have a hard time turning spreadsheet data into BIM,” states the survey.
The year in construction technology saw robots being used on more job sites in the real world, powerful data-aggregation applications adopted to save time and drones at work above many jobsites, despite lagging guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration.
With no relief in sight from a Federal Aviation Administration requirement that all drone flights be overseen by licensed drone pilots, a San Francisco-based company that had been developing an autonomous aerial jobsite survey system is adjusting.
At Autodesk Inc.’s user conference in Las Vegas, Dec. 1-3, the company talked about new releases, it’s plan to move everything into the cloud and robot-human work relations.
Field tests of a high-speed video system that reveals distortion by exaggerating tiny deflections show promise as the basis for a new, flexible and relatively inexpensive structural health analysis tool.
Various “thought leaders” in the industry have been trying—some would say hitting their heads against the wall—for at least the 37 years that I have been covering buildings (and likely before that), to use technology to streamline, automate and quicken building design and construction.
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