The Cluster of Excellence IntCDC (Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture) of the University of Stuttgart aims to rethink design, fabrication and construction in order to tackle the current challenges of the building industry, such as the lack of sustainability and productivity. IntCDC is home to more than 120 researchers from the University of Stuttgart and the Max-Planck-Institute of Intelligent Systems and has been funded by the German Research Foundation DFG since 2019.
One of the research activities within this interdisciplinary project is the development of a cyber-physical construction platform for automated on-site assembly of prefabricated building elements. For the realisation of such automated processes, the availability of suitable spatial data is essential. As the IntCDC team wants to be able to monitor the progress of construction works at its test site in a daily or even shorter interval, the team decided to use the ZEB Horizon as a tool to capture this data in a fast and flexible way.
The IntCDC will use the ZEB Horizon to capture up-to-date as-built point clouds, which will be the basis for monitoring and planning of the automated construction processes. For this purpose, the team will not only use the purely geometric information and the colour information delivered by the ZEB Horizon and ZEB Cam, but also use them to derive semantic information.
As the test construction site is still being set up at the moment, the team has captured its current status as a first test to get familiar with the handling of the ZEB Horizon and ZEB Cam. It took just 15 minutes to capture the test site shown in the image below including the even bigger indoor facilities. After half an hour of processing with GeoSLAM Hub the team had a ready-to use point cloud. Such kind of a 3D representation of the facilities did not exist before and will be helpful for various stakeholders within the interdisciplinary project as basis for planning, measuring, visualisation and simulations.
The IntCDC outdoor test site captured with the ZEB Horizon. The tower crane is part of a cyber-physical construction platform.
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