As we conclude our second year at HumanTech, we have taken the chance to reflect on a period marked by significant achievements and progress in our mission to drive the digitalisation of the construction sector with cutting-edge, human-centred technologies. This year, we have reinforced our core values: collaboration, innovation, and scientific excellence, achieving milestones that push the boundaries of what is possible in construction technology.
Parallel to our continuous advancements in the scientific field, this year also saw the consolidation of our partner’s individual results into integrated systems, which resulted in impressive demonstrations.
Milestones and achievements
A successful Mid-Term Review Meeting
A key milestone for the project was our 18-month periodic reporting and review, hosted by IMPLENIA in Zurich in January 2024. The event was unanimously a great success, validated by the entirely positive feedback we received.
The highlight of the review was the closing demo session, featuring live demonstrations of:
- Autonomous site scanning with an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) by ZHAW
- Localisation and worker body pose tracking with a head-mounted camera and inertial sensors by SciTrack and RICOH
- Automated Scan-to-BIM pipeline by RPTU and DFKI
- Object Pose estimation for robotic grasping by DFKI
Progress in robotics and AI technologies continues
In the following months, we witnessed additional significant progress in bringing robotic and AI technologies to the construction industry. These results were shown primarily in two events: the HumanTech Executive Board Meeting in Genova, organized by STAM, and our Robotic Integration Hackathon, hosted in Madrid at ACCIONA’s construction test site.
During the hackathon, project partners had the first opportunity to test and integrate their components on the newly created BAUBOT robotic platform for HumanTech.
Some key results shown in these two events were:
- Robotic grasping and handover of materials (SINTEF, TECNALIA, BAUBOT, DFKI, ACCIONA)
- Teleoperated mastic application (TECNALIA, SINTEF, BAUBOT, ACCIONA)
- BIM visualization overlaid over real building in XR (HOLOLIGHT)
Demonstrating scientific excellence
During this period, our commitment to scientific excellence has been recognised through numerous awards and publications at major conferences:
- 1st place awards in 3 categories in the Benchmark on Object Pose challenge 2023 at the ICCV 2023 conference
- 3 rd place in the Scan-to-BIM challenge of the CVPR 2023 conference
- 8 scientific publications, among others, in the prestigious CVPRx2, ICCVx1, and WACVx1 conferences
An equally important part of HumanTech’s mission is actively engaging with different communities in the construction field and disseminating our project results. For the second year in a row, we co-organized, along with the Tech4EUconstruction cluster, a highly successful “AI and Robotics in Construction” workshop at the European Robotics Forum (ERF) 2024 in Rimini.
HumanTech resources available
Recently, we have made several resources from our project openly available to everyone through our website. These include all the public deliverables from the first 18 months of the project, source code repositories for many of our scientific publications, our micro-learning units, and a variety of datasets that will be enriched and extended in the future.
Looking ahead
We are not done just yet!
We still have another whole year ahead with one main challenge: Implementing our 5 project pilots! We will do it across diverse settings (office buildings, bridges) and countries (Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore) between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025.
This article has been written by Jason Rambach, HumanTech’s Project Coordinator and Senior Researcher and Team Leader in Spatial Sensing and Machine Perception at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Learn more about him in this interview.
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