Our team member Fabian Kaufmann, a Researcher at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, has explained our project, focused on developing human-centred technologies to create a safer and greener construction industry, on the German radio station Antenne Kaiserslautern.
Listen to the short interview in German and read the transcript in English below.
Interviewer: It’s time to talk about a topic that we in Kaiserslautern are almost sick of hearing about: construction sites. We know them all too well here in and around Lautern.
Construction sites not only cause traffic chaos but also cost a lot of money — especially when mistakes are made all the time. 10% of the cost of a construction site is exclusively due to mistakes. They arise, for example, when parts are installed incorrectly.
The German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) is working on the HumanTech project here in Lautern, in which Fabian Kaufmann, co-initiator of the project, is collaborating.
“At HumanTech, we want to minimise the 10% cost that errors represent in construction sites with the help of AI” — Fabian Kaufmann.
Fabian: That’s right. At HumanTech, we want to avoid precisely these mistakes with the help of AI. For example, by knowing more about the status of a construction site.
How is the project going? What is being built? Is it being built correctly? Have any mistakes been made?
In this way, we want to minimise the 10% cost that errors represent. Ultimately, these also mean having incorrectly installed material, which has to be torn down at the end to rebuild it correctly. So, we also hope to save a lot of resources.
Interviewer: So, the construction site should be constantly checked and scanned. But how exactly is that supposed to work?
Fabian: For example, it can be done by regularly recording the state of a construction site with drones.
If something is being concreted, it can be recorded regularly with a drone, generate three-dimensional data and evaluate it with AI. In this way, we can find out which components have been built and whether they are in the right place, which auxiliary structures and materials are currently being used, or whether there are auxiliary materials that can be used elsewhere because they are not needed at the moment.
“HumanTech is an exciting project that can help save costs and make the construction industry safer and more environmentally friendly in the future” — Antenne Kaiserslautern.
Interviewer: An exciting project that can help save costs and make the construction industry safer and more environmentally friendly in the future.
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