A collaboration between the University of Illinois and Turner Construction Company has earned a Turner Innovation Award in Turner’s Fourth Annual Award for Innovation program.

Turner Construction Company, a 113-year old construction firm completes $10 Billion worth of work a year and is recognized as the largest builder in the U.S.

Civil & Environmental Engineering Professor Mani Golparvar-Fard, a faculty entrepreneurial fellow is the lead principal investigator on the group, and CS Associate Professor Derek Hoiem and Aerospace Engineering Associate Professor Tim Bretl are co-principal investigators on the project. The team also involved Jacob Lin, Kevin Han, Nour Dabboussi, Gustavo Garcia, CEE graduate students; Darren Liu, CEE undergraduate student; and Joseph Degol, Rajbir Kataria, and Ka Wai Tsoi, CS graduate students.

The University of Illinois team has developed predictive visual data analytics tools, called “Flying Superintendent” to automate and streamline today’s time-consuming practices for construction progress monitoring. Their Turner Innovation Award-winning solution utilizes both images and videos taken with camera drones and four-dimensional Building Information Modeling (BIM) to quickly identify and visually communicate the actual and potential performance problems during execution of construction projects via smartphones and tablets to project participants, on and off site.

“Our web-based solution provides real-time visual reporting of work complete using unordered images collected by any device, from drones to commodity phones," Goparvar-Fard said. "All personnel, on and off site, can interact with our 3D visual production models to communicate and analyze work in progress throughout the life of the job. Teams can conduct quality control by comparing as-built models with specifications, and improve safety by having a clear and immediate understanding of potential hazards. The analytics we conduct on these survey-grade 3D visual production models offer construction managers a transparent view into what’s happening on site each day, empowering them to improve reliability in short-term plans and eliminate problems before they happen.”

Turner Construction Company’s Northern California office implemented the technology on the NBA’s Sacramento Kings new downtown arena, the Golden 1 Center. The goal was to use the resulting color-coded 3D visual production models from the University of Illinois technology to easily and quickly inform project stakeholders about at-risk locations on a project site, allow them to prioritize problems based on their impact on construction plan, and take corrective actions to improve the reliability of short-term project plans and develop more productive workflows for construction.

Lincoln Wood, regional manager for virtual design and construction at Turner Construction Company said that while it monitors progress closely on its projects, the aerial images and software analysis being used provide a comprehensive picture of what’s going on, and can highlight how a slowdown in one area may affect the entire project. “The powerful thing about this is that it highlights issues with our schedule grouped by their location in 3D.  This streamlines the management of our weekly work planning efforts by allowing us to visualize and mitigate potential risks to our schedule before they happen.”

Wood noted that this effort couldn’t have been done without the help of Janie Winning, Turner Construction Company VDC Scheduler; Jim Barrett, National Director of Innovation at Turner Construction Company; Thomas Bartlett, CEO of Image In Flight; and the team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by Golparvar-Fard.

The University of Illinois team received a nearly $1 million Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) grant through the National Science Foundation for the project, which kicked off in January 2015 and continues through the end of 2019. With the support of the new faculty entrepreneurial fellowship (FEF) program by the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC), Golparvar-Fard and the team are commercializing the solution via RECONSTRUCT Inc. a new spinoff company housed in University of Illinois Research Park.

To further streamline the data collection practice, the team is currently developing and testing their recent prototypes to autonomously collect images on construction sites using the drones and ground robots without heavily relying on GPS for navigation purposes. As part of this project, the team is also exploring mechanisms to autonomously mount video cameras on building elements to detect and track construction resources and offer visual data analytics on construction safety and productivity.