“Ideas and solutions are the easy part,” says Ricardo Khan, senior director of innovation at Mortenson Construction. It’s “the process” that is the real challenge.

Khan’s midday keynote captured a key theme of the second day of the virtual新利18备用Enr FutureTech会议—the need to identify the problems in your construction process before you start throwing technology at them. Speakers across the day went deep into the details of digital twin models and scanning jobsites with robotic dogs, but all of them touched on the basic rule that you have to know what it is you are after before deploying new technologies.

麦肯锡公司的行业专家约书亚·约翰逊（Joshua Johnson）表示，肯定有问题可以解决建筑。

他告诉组装的虚拟受众。根据麦肯锡自己的数字，通过将更多技术实施到其流程中，建筑公司的生产率有可能提高14％至15％。

While there is a relatively low level of technology adoption, particularly among small and midsize construction firms, that creates opportunities for experimentation, says Johnson. “The level of digitization is low, but there is ton of white space out there for technology players to drive value in the construction industry.”

The potential for new technology to quickly take hold came up in a panel on “Digital Twin Models and AI for Owners of a Technology Campus Transformation.” Mani Golparvar, CTO of Reconstruct, and Shawn Mahoney, CEO and president of OAC Services presented about how going all in on a new approach can sometimes pay off.

Constantly Updating Model

通过使用重建的不断更新模型的使用，Mahoney说，在设计上花费的额外努力可以在施工期间支付股息。他说：“我们对客户的建议是，将所有内容都放入这些型号和数字双胞胎的前期，首先在模型中构建它，然后再验证您可以在野外建造的污垢铲之前。”

Reconstruct’s model of a project reflected every change on site, documented through drones and other visual captures. OAS has used it while serving as owner’s representative on a massive Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., with 18 buildings on 72 acres, and Mahoney says it was crucial to keeping the project on track. It all came from a chance encounter with a Reconstruct demo. “When I saw this at FutureTech two years ago, I almost jumped out of my seat,” he says.

Reality capture itself has come a long way in the last decade, and firms are finding the real business cases for deploying it. Panelists for “Turning Smart Imaging Into Smart Actions” discussed specific technologies they are testing on construction projects. Josh DeStefano, Southwest VDC leader with DPR Construction, said that the company has been using SmartTrack, a StructionSite tool that captures field data using 360° cameras and automatically updates quantities of work using AI on three projects. An inspector walks the site with the camera on a tripod or hardhat.

他说：“当我们拥有视觉效果和数字时，我们可以确定要落后于何处，在哪里更有生产力。”他指出，平均每周花费12到15个小时来进行生产跟踪，而不是解决问题，并且不尽早发现生产问题可能会导致高达15％的利润损失。

DPR的Drywall团队正在使用自动化视频捕获和机器学习来计算和跟踪与2D估算的工作完整估计，其精度为99％。他说，随着DPR的自我绩效（包括石膏板和混凝土）在内的大部分工作，它计划将三个试点项目扩展到“广泛利用”中。新利18备用网址

Eric Law, senior director of technology and innovation at Swinerton, discussed the company’s yearlong experience with Spot,波士顿动力学的机器人“狗”走一个工地现场以360°相机和激光雷达canning. The results were more consistent, higher-quality data than when humans had to do the weekly walk, he said. It turns out the robot was far steadier than a human using the same instruments, and better able to perform captures from a consistent height off the floor. Law’s team even used Spot to record air-quality levels on the site.

法律预计，一两年之内，该技术将变得更具成本效益。他说：“随着成本新利18备用官网登录下降，[这将是一个可行的解决方案。”

Cultivating Innovation

And, as several presenters reiterated, real innovation is often more than just finding the right point solution. In his keynote, Ricardo Khan of Mortenson walked through his firm’s journey of cultivating innovation within the company. “We started with a centralized HQ model,” for innovation development, recalled Khan. But after a while the company realized that might be a bottleneck for new ideas. “We then moved into a distributed model, and allowed our businesses to take on those [new] processes, and we support them,” he explains. “It helped remove roadblocks [to adoption].”

And there was one last tip to deploying new innovations that Khan says is sometimes overlooked. “Don’t forget to talk to your legal and risk teams about IP [intellectual property] issues, it’s easy to forget that,” he says.