Tag: <span>artificial intelligence</span>

Tag: artificial intelligence

RT3 Members Present on Data and AI at METALCON

Posted on

By Karen L. Edwards.

METALCON 2019 took place in Steel City – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and RT3 members were well represented at the show, exhibiting and speaking.  On the first day of the show, RT3 hosted a discussion on the importance of artificial intelligence and utilizing data for contractors.

Bill Wilkins of Pointivo spoke about AI and explained that there are a number of companies that offer AI-assisted approaches to roof evaluations.  His company has been working with another RT3 member to develop a system that will do just that. Bill explained asking a person to try to look at an image and identify drains, equipment, ponding water, areas of membrane splits, etc. can be a very time-consuming process.  Ai is a great opportunity to help augment a younger , more inexperienced work force in identifying rooftop conditions and problem areas.

AI can tell you what it thinks is on the roof and provide a confidence level in its identification. How you help is by looking at what it found and either confirming it or correcting it. Each time you provide confirmation or correction, it will learn from the information and keep getting better at what it does. Bill explained that they feel pretty confident that the tool they are introducing next year will be able to reduce the amount of time spent on evaluations by 80 percent through the use of drones and AI.

Key things for AI to be successful is quality data, quantity of data. Bill shared the example of teaching AI to recognize on AC unit on a roof. Because an AC unit is so large, it might only need to ‘see’ 100 images to be able to accurately identify the AC unit every time. Trying to identify hail damage will be harder, because it’s much smaller in size.  The more data, imagery and confirmations it receives, the smarter and faster it becomes.

Josey Parks of Cognitive Contractor shared how AI and data can be a powerful lead and  sales tool for roofing businesses. Josey explained that if you take the records for 1,000 customers and run them through an AI program it will learn from the data. It will recognize patterns of the first 70 percent (or 700 records). Then it will take the next 300 records and predict their behavior based on what it learned from the first 700 and provide them a score.  Contractors should understand the data that they have in their business and how they can structure it to understand what drives your business and your customers.

Josey explained how when he started in metal roofing, he would keep track on a paper of what neighborhoods he had knocked doors in, then he advanced to using a bike trail app to track the locations where he and his sales team had been. They have advanced today to sending emails and plotting on a map (like Google Earth) the locations of the people who opened the email. This allows the canvassers to have an optimized route to work from.

Taking it one step further with the advancement in technology, Josey explained that he is able to use AI to score and predict his leads to the point that it knows which salesperson is the best one to assign that lead to, based on past performance of the sales person.  It’s important to optimize your business and not waste time and resources assigning the wrong leads to the wrong salesperson.

If you missed their talk at METALCON, you can watch it on our Facebook page under Videos.  Be sure to sign up for the Smart Brief e-newsletter to get the latest roofing tech news in your inbox.

 

Robots might one day be driving your trucks

Posted on

By Karen L. Edwards.

There is a new robot in development that can turn any vehicle into a driverless one. IVObility, an Israeli startup is developing a robot that sits in the driver’s seat and literally drives the vehicle. It’s coming in the not-too-distant future with a 2020 launch planned for government and off-road commercial applications, with a consumer-market version in consideration.

This means that potentially in a few years, robots will become our drivers. The IVObility robot will work in any vehicle, it doesn’t have to be equipped with sensors or other self-driving technology. The company successfully develop an autonomous underwater vehicle that drives itself called the HydroCamel and is now turning its development efforts to cars and trucks that drive on land.

Whereas most autonomous vehicles remove the operations from the driver’s seat, this robot sits in it and ‘sees’ what a driver would see. It looks somewhat human, with a head containing sensors and arm and leg-like limbs to work the pedals and the steering wheel. By having the robot sitting in the seat driving, the vehicle doesn’t need to have LiDar, radar or other sensors mounted around the vehicle.

CEO Tzvika Goldner told Car and Driver that “IVObility aims to launch its driving robot by the middle of next year and intends to offer three versions: most will be fully autonomous, but some will offer more cost-effective semi-autonomous capability or remote-controlled operation.”

The company is initially focusing on off-road applications such as mining, agriculture, border patrol and security with a pilot being launch at an airport in Europe later this year. This plug-and-play style model might be the answer for cost effectively retrofitting existing vehicles into self-driving ones.

Some things to consider are if and when a consumer version is ready to hit the streets, how could that affect who we have driving trucks to jobsites and what impact would that have on insurance costs? While there is no mention of what a robot chauffeur would cost, there is potential for insurance or liability cost savings to offset or even pay for the robot.

Photo credit: IVObility

Study suggests autonomous robots working together are the industry’s next big thing

Posted on

By Karen L. Edwards.

Collective robotic construction (CRC) specifically concerns embodied, autonomous, multirobot systems that modify a shared environment according to high-level, user-specified goals.

A Science Robotics study published this March states that ‘the increasing need for safe, inexpensive, and sustainable construction, combined with novel technological enablers, has made large-scale construction by robot teams an active research area.’

The study notes that 54% of the human population currently live in cities and that number is expected to grow to 66% by 2050. The researchers feel that collective robotics can help meet the construction demand in the midst of an ongoing labor shortage. CRC could also make construction safer for workers, with the Department of Labor citing that 20% of all worker injuries occur in construction.

The researchers were inspired by the extensive use of collective construction in nature for building nests, protection barriers, traps and mobility scaffolds. Where animal construction relies on reactive behaviors and ‘low-bandwidth communication,’ robots can rely on high-resolution sensors, high-speed communication and GPS to communicate their exact location for completing specific tasks.

Construction materials used in CRC are divided into two categories – discrete and continuous. Discrete materials would be square, rectangular or homogenous bricks, struts and sandbags. Continuous materials would be things like two-component foam, concrete and fibers.

The study says that “challenges pertain to CRC hardware, especially in relation to coordination, communication, and multimodal sensing.” The robots need to be able to adequately communicate and coordinate with nearby robots for success. “As more advanced sensors such as radar, depth cameras, laser imaging and ranging systems, and GPS become cheaper and more readily accessible, they may play a bigger role in the field. ”

The researchers reference two published systems, UAVs and climbing robots,  that can be used to develop a metric that measures constructed volume relative to time, the number of robots used and the volumetric size of each robot. “A flying robot [UAV] has higher energy expenditure and lower payload than a climbing robot but may fly directly between material cache and deposition sites. Reversely, climbing robots can carry more but have to traverse through previous construction.”

The study is the first step in really determining how robotics can make an impact in construction. Further study is needed to develop performance metrics, evaluate the reliability of CRC and it’s ability to adapt to changes in movement, or expected behaviors of the other robots. There also needs to be more research in order to determine where humans fit into the CRC picture to oversee work, make adjustments and corrections when there is an error and in the support and maintenance of the robots.

Read the full study here. 

How Predictive Analytic Technology Can Grow Your Roofing Business

Posted on

By Tony Agresta, Vice President of Marketing, Nearmap

 

Predictive analytics is not new, it’s been used by marketers for many years. It is simply using historical data on response or performance to determine who is most likely to buy a product or respond to a promotion. For example, cataloguers would take a sampling of data, send out a mailing and track who responds. The more data they had about the people such as income, age, interests, prior buying history, the better they could predict future buying behavior since the responders and non-responders could be modeled.

By scoring and modeling the data, a company could focus their dollars and marketing efforts on the people who scored highest and were determined to be the most likely to buy. Rich, accurate models leverage robust data sets.   That same concept can be applied to roofing, using modern technology, to determine the properties most likely to need roofing services.

Many roofing contractors today already understand the value that high-resolution aerial maps bring to their business. The images provide a lot of data about a property that satellite imagery cannot. For instance, using freely available satellite imagery, it’s not easy to tell the difference between a solar panel or a skylight on a roof, and it can be hard to tell what type of roofing material is on the property.

With higher-resolution aerial maps, contractors can review properties, see the type of roof, whether there are skylights, solar panels, outbuildings, the presence or absence of trees, and can even look back over time to see how the roofs may have changed.   High-resolution aerial maps provide the detail needed to classify features of the property and the grounds.  Just the way the cataloguers could use sample data to differentiate responders from non-responders or multi-product buyers from single product buyers, aerial maps can be used to create data sets that classify type of roof and other features.

When machine learning algorithms are applied to this new source of data, users can automatically detect which properties have skylights, or solar panels or missing shingles. It could detect the pitch and potentially the type of roof material. Then the algorithm could store all those attributes in a database. The database is important because now you have data about all the properties in an area that can be queried.

Querying the database would allow a contractor to ask for only properties that meet certain criteria to be returned. Perhaps you want roofs of a certain size, or ones that appear to have damage, or only want to look at roofs with asphalt shingles. You no longer must spend the time manually scanning through images of properties, the algorithm does it for you.

By assigning scores to certain characteristics and using artificial intelligence and machine learning, the database can deliver a list of leads that are prime candidates for a new roof. This allows you to strategically deploy your sales team to the homes that score the highest, rather than walking a neighborhood knocking on every door.  Companies providing aerial maps are applying machine learning to vivid imagery. They are refining the algorithms, building accuracy into the models and making the resulting data available to roofers to help drive their business faster.

Study Finds Construction Industry Can Benefit From Artificial Intelligence Adoption

Posted on

A McKinsey & Co. study on artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the construction industry reports a combined use of machines and digital technology can enhance quality control, project scheduling, data analysis, and project cost savings, according to www.constructiondive.com.

The construction industry currently is the second-least digitized economic sector in the world, and the industry needs to lay the groundwork before AI can be widely adopted. The study identifies investment in data collection and processing tools like cloud infrastructure and advanced analytics as the first step.

There has been increased interest in sensors, cloud-based data sharing and mobile connectivity within the construction industry. Some employers already are using wearable sensory devices to monitor workers’ location and equipment at worksites. Data collected from the devices is transmitted to a cloud-based platform accessible from any compatible mobile device. AI algorithms advance the process one step further by deploying real-time solutions based on data analysis, helping employers ensure their workers stay safe on the job.

Industry employers may look to other industries that have successfully used AI to optimize processes, including the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. The study notes an AI algorithm is used by the pharmaceutical industry to predict medical trial outcomes; a similar algorithm may be used by the construction industry to forecast project risks and constructability. And image recognition algorithms used by the healthcare industry to support diagnoses may enable drones to assess construction site images for signs of defects or structural failures.

Note: This article first published on the NRCA website and can be viewed here.

The rise of AI in construction

Posted on

These days, when people hear the term Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), they typically react in one of two ways:

  1. They imagine talking robots and movies such as The Terminator, The Matrix and Ex Machina.
  2. They start shuffling in their chairs uncomfortably and freaking out about having no clue what the term means.

But thankfully, A.I. doesn’t have to be so complicated. And it’s so much more (and right now, a lot less scary) than world-dominating robots and talking machines.

In fact, A.I. tech is already infiltrating the built world. From design, to project management, to jobsite safety, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is transforming the way we construct our world.

It comes at the perfect time – Statista.com is projecting a 27% increase in construction spending in the coming years due to grave infrastructure needs. Simultaneously, the construction labor force is shrinking. Leveraging A.I. will be essential to keeping up with demand.

When you consider the possibility of having machines design buildings and monitor the jobsite more closely than ever before, it rapidly becomes clear the positive impact that A.I. can have on the industry and that it will no doubt have a place in its future.

So, with all of that, we wanted to provide you with a roadmap.

BuiltWorlds recently partnered with Microsoft to put together a six-page research brief titled “The Rise of A.I. in Construction” to help you make sense of this new technology and its potential impact on your business and the broader industry.

Inside the brief, you’ll learn:

  1. How to describe A.I. to your colleagues and friends
  2. The differences between A.I., machine learning, and deep learning
  3. Case studies of A.I. technologies that are revolutionizing the design process, scheduling and productivity, project management and jobsite safety
  4. Fresh perspectives on A.I. from built world thought leaders and predictions for the future

Access the research brief.

Note: This article first appeared on BuiltWorlds’ website and can be viewed here.

Four Key Tech Trends Revolutionizing Architectural Design and Construction

Posted on

By Peter Diamantis

From self-healing materials to 4D printing to artificial intelligent-driven design to robots, the construction and building industry is being drastically changed by technology.

If you could design any structure, free of all constraints, what would you envision? Put aside today’s architectural limits. What home would you dream up? Exponential technologies are converging and revolutionizing the way we design, build and inhabit everything. The global construction industry is projected to surpass $10 trillion in 2020, and the total U.S. housing stock alone grew to $31.8 trillion last year.

Both industries are ripe for massive disruption.

In this blog, I’ll be covering four key tech trends that are revolutionizing what is possible in architectural design and construction:

  1. Autonomous robot builders
  2. 3D and 4D printing
  3. New materials from unexpected sources
  4. Designs that adapt as you build

Let’s dive in.

New Materials Enter Construction

For thousands of years, we’ve been constrained by the construction materials of nature. We built bricks from naturally abundant clay and shale, used tree limbs as our rooftops and beams, and mastered incredible structures in ancient Rome with the use of cement. But construction materials are about to get a HUGE upgrade.

Here are the top three materials disrupting the future of construction:

  1. Upcycled Materials: Imagine if you could turn the world’s greatest waste products into their most essential building blocks.

Thanks to UCLA researchers at CO2NCRETE, we can already do this with carbon emissions.Today, concrete produces about 5% of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But what if concrete could instead conserve greenhouse emissions? CO2NCRETE engineers capture carbon from smokestacks and combine it with lime to create a new type of cement. The lab’s 3D printers then shape the upcycled concrete to build entirely new structures. Once conquered at scale, upcycled concrete will turn a former polluter into a future conserver.

Want to print houses from dirt? No problem. The Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) can now turn any soil into a building material with three times the tensile strength of industrial clay. A massive breakthrough for developing regions, IAAC’s new 3D printed native soil can build houses on-site for as little as $1,000.

  1. Nanomaterials: Nano- and micro-materials are ushering in a new era of smart, super-strong and self-charging buildings.

While carbon nanotubes dramatically increase the strength-to-weight ratio of skyscrapers, revolutionizing their structural flexibility, nanomaterials don’t stop here. Several research teams are pioneering silicon nanoparticles to capture everyday light flowing through our windows. Little solar cells at the edges of windows then harvest this energy for ready use. (Thermochromic smart windows change color when exposed to sunlight.)

Researchers at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab have developed similar smart windows. Turning into solar panels when bathed in sunlight, these thermochromic windows will power our buildings, changing color as they do.

  1. Self-Healing Infrastructure: The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates a $542.6 billion backlog needed for U.S. infrastructure repairsalone. And as I’ve often said, the world’s most expensive problems are the world’s most profitable opportunities.

Enter self-healing concrete. Engineers at Delft University have developed bio-concrete that can repair its own cracks. As head researcher Henk Jonkers explains, “What makes these limestone-producing bacteria so special is that they are able to survive in concrete for more than 200 years and come into play when the concrete is damaged. […] If cracks appear as a result of pressure on the concrete, the concrete will heal these cracks itself.”

But bio-concrete is only the beginning of self-healing technologies. As futurist architecture firms start printing plastic and carbon-fiber houses like the stunner seen below (using Branch Technologies’ 3D printing technology), engineers are tackling self-healing plastic.

WATG Designs 3D-Printed Freeform House with Carbon-Fiber Reinforced Plastic

Plastic not only holds promise in real estate on Earth, it will also serve as a handy material in space. NASA engineers have pioneered a self-healing plastic that may prove vital in space missions, preventing habitat and ship ruptures in record speed.

The implications of self-healing materials are staggering, offering us resilient structures both on earth and in space.

Enhanced Design & Architecture

While incredible new materials transform what we build, AI and VR are revolutionizing how we design.

  1. AI-Driven Design: In the past, if you wanted to build a high-rise, you needed a static, precise blueprint. Moving parts were not an option.

Now, real-time, AI-aided Building Information Model (BIM) will enable blueprints to learn and adapt to changing ground conditions, weather, equipment and even new design ideas.

In the future, AI will help design our blueprints, optimizing construction methods, breakthrough materials, and design features. It may even recommend IoT components for our high-rises depending on their purpose and landscape.

  1. Virtual Reality Shaping Real Estate: In one of my previous blogs, I discussed how VR will reshape our real estate shopping experience. Forget real estate agents and physical house hunting. Why not visit a house in a different city from the comfort of your living room at 3 a.m. and see how it looks with blue walls and your own home furniture?

VR is about to transform the real estate design process too. Imagine the possibilities: you design your company’s dream office using a Building Information Model and allow your managers to walk around the (virtually) finished product before it’s ever built.

Build with Robots and 3D Printing

Designs and machinery won’t build us finished products on their own… or will they? Welcome to the new frontier of autonomous robot builders and skyscraper printers.

  1. Autonomous Robotics and Robot Swarm Construction: While robots have already started permeating the construction industry, what if they could construct buildings entirely autonomously?

Many are already tackling this challenge, using everything from flying robots to termite-like swarm constructors.

RoboticsX aims to send autonomous robot builders to Mars that can adapt to shifting ground conditions. CEO Peter Boras spoke of plans to scale up 3,000 collaborating robots in the hopes of building structures almost entirely unaided. The company’s X-1 Smart Industrial Robot can already collaborate with its colleagues, adapt tasks in real time, share its capabilities with other machines and perform predictive maintenance.

A team at Switzerland’s NCCR Digital Fabrication has also built a fabricator robot. Pre-programmed with design model data, the robot can build any steel-reinforced framework autonomously on-site.

Inspired by autonomously collaborative termites, Harvard robotics researchers developed swarm construction robots that can collaboratively build a programmed design, block-by-block, without centralized control.

Imagine the implications. Eliminating human safety concerns and unlocking any environment, autonomous builder robots could collaboratively build massive structures in space, or deep underwater habitats.

  1. 3D and 4D Printing: In one of the developments I’m most excited about, we will soon be printing tomorrow’s structures. 3D and 4D printing are redefining the way our buildings look, feel and even move.

You may have heard of the Chinese company WinSun Design Engineering Co., which printed 10 houses from recycled materials in 24 hours at a cost of about $4,800 each.

Or Dutch studio DUS Architects, who used sustainable bioplastic to 3D print a full-sized canal house in Amsterdam.

But architectural printing is only getting started.

While companies like INNOprint can print an emergency shelter in only half an hour, others are finding ways to print unprecedented designs, like this never-ending looped house, buildable with one massive robotic 3D printer.

Janjaap Ruijssenaars 3D prints prototype of house with no beginning or end

And now for the real kicker: Remember those magical moving staircases in the Harry Potter films? Turns out these may no longer be exclusive to the wizarding world.

4D printing will one day make such structures a reality. Born out of MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, 4D printing involves 3D printed objects that can reshape and even self-assemble over time.

These structures involve 3D printing rigid and expandable materials alongside one another. When the expandable materials encounter certain conditions, like water or heat, they reshape and reposition other rigid parts of the structure.

As a result, 4D printed structures have moving joints that can reshape the entire component, whether into different shapes or stairwell directions.

Final Thoughts

With the convergence of autonomous builder robots, 3D and 4D printing, AI-guided design and unprecedented smart materials, we are about to witness the mass disruption of construction and real estate.

What new architectural frontiers will you unlock? How will your company design and print the future? What homes and space colonies will we inhabit?

Join Me

  1. A360 Executive Mastermind: This is the sort of conversation I explore at my Executive Mastermind group called Abundance 360. The program is highly selective, for 360 abundance and exponentially minded CEOs (running $10M to $10B companies). If you’d like to be considered, apply here.

Share this with your friends, especially if they are interested in any of the areas outlined above.

  1. Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital.

Abundance-Digital is my ‘on-ramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs – those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

Note: This article was first received via email from Peter Diamantis.