At HumanTech, we have reached a new milestone: successfully celebrating our Mid-Term Review Meeting! From 22 to 24 January 2024, representatives from the 21 partner organisations that comprise our team gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, to comprehensively review our progress since we started working in June 2022 and agree on our next steps. A process that has helped us align our priorities to further our mission — to achieve breakthroughs in cutting-edge technologies, contributing to a safer, more efficient and digitised European construction industry.
“We successfully completed the HumanTech project Mid-Term Review Meeting with presentations and demos that are highly convincing of the project’s scientific excellence and contribution to bringing AI to the construction industry” — Jason Rambach, HumanTech Project Coordinator.
To warm up and take advantage of the fact that we were in a perfect place to learn, we made an insightful visit to a construction site at our partner’s IMPLENIA headquarters.
The meeting started with an introduction by our Project Officer at the European Commission and our Expert Project Reviewer.
Next, Jason Rambach, our Project Coordinator (from DFKI), presented an overview of our objectives and the current state of our work, providing a solid foundation for the day’s discussions.
In-depth analysis of our technical developments
Leaders of the different areas of HumanTech made detailed presentations on the technical work we are developing, highlighting our most notable advances.
- Our progress on ‘BIMxD Formats and Standardization’ was presented by Rachele Bernardello (University of Padova).
- Ruprecht Altenburger (ZHAW) delved into ‘Dynamic Semantic Twin Generation’.
- Bruno Mirbach (DFKI) brought insights into ‘Wearable Technologies for Construction’.
- Gabor Sziebig (SINTEF) showcased our advancements in ‘Construction Robotics and Human-Robot Collaboration’.
- Gloria Callinan (TUS) shared details on ‘Human Factors – Training and Usability Assessment’, a key aspect of the project.
- Fabian Kaufmann (RPTU) highlighted the ongoing work on ‘Pilots, Evaluation, and Validation’, providing insights into the practical implementation of our technologies.
- Giulia Pastor (AUSTRALO) explored the ‘Outreach, Exploitation, and Collaboration’ efforts we have undertaken.
Throughout the presentations, we received constructive feedback and recommendations from our Project Officer and Reviewer, which will help us to further boost our success.
Demo session and feedback
The meeting concluded with an impressive live session of our innovative and interdisciplinary demos, showcasing our:
- scan-to-BIM pipeline (ZHAW, DFKI, RPTU),
- wearable localisation (Sci-track – DFKI),
- object pose estimation for grasping bricks (DFKI),
- and Human-Robot-Collaboration interfaces (SINTEF).
“On these reviews, the demos have always been my highlight. Especially on a project the size of HumanTech, it is really inspiring how partners from different disciplines collaborate on these prototypes and present an integrated proof-of-concept for complex problems”, says our colleague Markus Miezal, Co-Founder of Sci-track. He had the opportunity to demonstrate an initial version of a visual-inertial body tracking sensor of a worker within a Building Information Model (BIM) — an integrated prototype that includes a 360-degree camera from our partner, RICOH.
This meeting was packed with valuable discussions and learnings that will fuel our project’s crucial next phase as we continue to shape the future of construction.
Special thanks to our HumanTech team, who did a fantastic job, and to IMPLENIA and our colleagues Patrick Roth and Sebastian Mattes for being such good hosts!
Stay tuned for more updates on our exciting journey.