HoloBuilder announced today their partnership with Boston Dynamics and released SpotWalk, a new product integration with Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot. The new partnership brings autonomous 360° reality capture to construction projects, addressing core productivity inefficiencies that continue hampering the construction industry.
A Walking Robot Captures 360° Images
Controlled by HoloBuilder’s SpotWalk app, the Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot can walk job sites autonomously, capturing 360° images that record the progress of a construction project over time. The process allows for quality and accuracy control, giving contractors, trade partners, and owners a living digital record of the project. The integration creates repeatable, actionable data, addresses all phases of a construction project, and improves productivity.
HoloBuilder’s machine learning engine, SiteAI, analyzes images captured by SpotWalk to get unprecedented insight into the jobsite. The project site data combined with the quantifiable analysis enables contractors and owners to report on progress ongoingly.
Hensel Phelps: High-Quality Photos in Less Time
“Time and accuracy are two things that are very important to a jobsite. Traditionally, you would have to sacrifice time out of a busy day to harvest jobsite pictures and organize them,” says Andrew Cameron, Project Manager at Hensel Phelps. “This partnership between HoloBuilder and Boston Dynamics removes a time-consuming step while providing accurate construction photos with a high degree of fidelity.”
Hensel Phelps conducted early pilot tests of the SpotWalk app at their $1.2 Billion San Francisco Harvey Milk Terminal 1 Airport project. The pilot showed that with minimal training on-site the project team can get SpotWalk functioning.
Autonomous Operation After Short Training
The SpotWalk app has two general modes. The first enables project teams to teach Spot the capture route simply by driving the robot via an intuitive smartphone interface. The second mode drives Spot autonomously on its trained path, taking pictures along the way at defined capture locations, delivering immediate value to the construction project and workforce.
“The SpotWalk app is a first of its kind integration for Boston Dynamics’ robots,” said Michael Perry, Vice President of Business Development of Boston Dynamics. “Our efforts have been to create a highly mobile robotics platform that can easily navigate unstructured or unknown environments. HoloBuilder’s SpotWalk app takes this a step further by creating an easy-to-use interface that fits seamlessly into construction workflows. We’re excited to see this integration start rolling out to early customers soon.”
The Early Adopter Program
Boston Dynamics and HoloBuilder announced that they will partner with innovative companies willing to provide feedback and continue advancing Spot and SpotWalk together. Beginning today, SpotWalk will be available through a six-month early adopter program in which customers will receive two Spot robots, the full HoloBuilder technology suite, and on-site training.
Since announcing the integration to HoloBuilder’s Innovators Club members (an exclusive club of feedback providing customers) interest in getting SpotWalk has been overwhelming.
“With SpotWalk, we can now enable our customers to capture data much more frequently and more precisely to get an even clearer picture of what the site’s progress is. We are very excited to release SpotWalk and to continue our very positive collaboration with Boston Dynamics to not only support the industry but to also drive digitization and automation forward,” said Christian Claus, CMO and Head of Partnerships at HoloBuilder.
Source: HoloBuilder, Las Vegas, Nevada, November 18, 2019
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