Construction
This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in manufacturing construction machinery, surface mining machinery, and logging equipment.
Assembly Line
Turning Cranes into Smart Devices with AI and IOT Technology
On many jobsites, our cranes function as control towers – orchestrating and driving a tremendous amount of construction activity. Seeking innovative ways to leverage IoT (internet of things) and AI (artificial intelligence) technologies to optimize crane efficiency, Turner’s Innovation Department engaged with Versatile, a construction technology start-up that captures crane data and turns it into actionable insights that can improve project performance.
Using AI, the device learns and classifies each item picked, captures the weight of the item, and records the cycle time of the lift so the team can understand exactly how the crane is being used. Through an online and mobile dashboard, project teams review data, set custom alerts and notifications, and view weekly reports generated by Versatile.
CraneView™ data improves our construction planning and scheduling, leading to increased productivity and better crane operations. Additionally, it enhances site safety by identifying unsafe behaviors such as riggers overloading or engaging in dangerous loading practices. This allows Turner to observe, communicate, and correct unsafe activity among riggers, signalmen, and operators on the project.
Robotics and AI: Unleashing the future of construction
Technical Solutions that Produce the Highest Quality Semiconductors | Exyte
Using Carbon Capture and Storage Digital Twins for Net Zero Strategies
One of the key challenges for keeping CCS solutions economical is the cost of proving duration and reliability of storage using numerical modeling. Traditional simulators for carbon sequestration are time-consuming and computationally expensive. Machine learning models provide similar accuracy levels while dramatically shrinking the time and costs required.
This post presents a new approach to carbon capture and storage that is substantially close to what is needed in industrial settings. It is readily available for real-world applications using NVIDIA Modulus and NVIDIA Omniverse. This CCS approach works on high-resolution, two-meter digital twin simulations over large spatial domains, handles a varying number of injection wells, and considers dipping and heterogeneous reservoirs. Most importantly, this new CCS method handles multiple wells and their interactions.
Hitachi Mining Excavators Factory Tour
How a high-rise being built in Detroit can change the way cities are built
ICON awarded $57.2 million NASA contract to develop lunar 3D printing construction system
The 57.2 million USD contract builds upon previous NASA and Department of Defense funding for ICON’s ‘Project Olympus’. The project’s goal is to develop space-based construction systems to support planned exploration of the moon and beyond. ICON’s Olympus system is intended to be a multi-purpose construction system primarily using local Lunar and Martian resources as building materials.
Supporting NASA’s Artemis program, ICON plans to bring its additive manufacturing hardware and software into space by a lunar gravity simulation flight. It also intends to work with lunar regolith samples brought back from Apollo missions and various regolith simulants to determine their mechanical behaviour in simulated lunar gravity.
New Industrial Robot at Cornell can 3D Print Large-Scale Structures for the Construction Industry
A new 6,000-pound industrial robot at Cornell University can 3D print the kind of large-scale structures that could transform the construction industry, making it more efficient and sustainable by eliminating the waste of traditional material manufacturing.
The Science of Production
Getting to this state of control was an iterative process - each time something was fixed, more data was collected, revealing new causes that the previous issues had masked. Each iteration proceeded the same way - plot the data on a control chart, look for patterns, locate the issue and make any necessary process adjustments.
Construction, once again, is a world that pushes production optimization difficulties to 11. All the things that make science hard to do in a manufacturing environment are even harder in construction. For one thing, construction has a much higher rate of process changes - every new project means new workers, new environmental conditions, new materials, new construction details, etc. Not only does this introduce new causes to the process, but it changes (if only slightly) what the basic process is. As we’ve seen with learning curves, it only takes very small disruptions to ‘reset’ what workers know about a process, and these disruptions occur much more frequently in construction.
How Construction Robotics Are Transforming Risk Management
“We’re starting to move away from purely tackling deviations on the site,” Maggs says. “It’s obviously valuable to define problems, but the quicker you find a deviation, the more valuable that data is. The destructive impact of a deviation increases the longer it goes unnoticed.
“Finding an off-spec element late in the game can be damaging for the project, so we’re moving more towards risk mitigation and risk allocations,” he continues. “We can also analyze data to identify trends within the construction process and then deliver back insights. That’s much more valuable than raw data alone. It’s providing actionable information around project risks that can help mitigate them.”
U.S. Army’s New Expeditionary 3D Concrete Printer Can Go Anywhere, Build Anything
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Automated Construction of Expeditionary Structures (ACES) program is a game changer for construction in remote areas. The project will supply rugged 3D concrete printers that can go anywhere and print (almost) anything. The project started several years ago when concrete printers were very much in their infancy, but even then it was obvious that commercial products would not fit the Army’s needs.
ACES has produced multiple printers working with different industry partners. For example, ACES Lite was made in partnership with Caterpillar under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement. It packs into a standard 20-foot shipping container and can be set-up or taken down in 45 minutes, has built-in jacks for quick leveling and can be calibrated in a matter of seconds, making it more straightforward than other devices. Overall the printer resembles a gantry crane, with a concrete pump, hose and a robotic nozzle which lays down precise layers.
The new technology is not magic, as 3D-printed construction is still construction. It does not do everything. A printed building still requires a roof and finishing touches like any other construction work. In areas with good logistics where equipment, labor and materials are all plentiful, there may be little advantage to the ACES approach. But in expeditionary environments, where all these things are likely to be in short supply, ACES could make a real difference.
Digital Twins at Olympic Scale
Not unlike its steel competitors, the Xuanhua facility, a subsidiary of China’s second-biggest steelmaker, HBIS Group Co., is gunning to reorganize on the basis of new demands for competition and efficiency. Relocating the 89-year-old factory to the Leting Economic Development Zone in Tangshan City in China’s Hebei province includes plans to develop a digital model for the factory.