Interdisciplinary Team Receives Turner Innovation Award
7/21/2016 12:30:00 PM
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.
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.”
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.