Each year, the construction industry spends between 9 and 12 trillion dollars worldwide. Unfortunately, the efficiency of the industry has remained stagnant over the last several decades. Some studies estimate as much as 30-40 percent of the cost of the building is due to waste and inefficient practices. A substantial part of that challenge comes from re-work on the job site. Kelly Cone, VP of Product Management of ClearEdge3D, believes that there is a huge gap between the real and digital world in the construction industry. Most often, the digital data around the existing innovations and infrastructure is out of date and creates obstacles in understanding and planning the construction. Another challenge is the varying tolerances as each scope has its own acceptable installation and fabrication tolerances, and these may or may not be coordinated with each other. This gives rise to prefabrication and waste leading to reworks.

Addressing these issues is ClearEdge3D, a leader in technological innovation in construction that is fomenting the adoption of reality capture and scan-to-BIM workflows.

The company’s best-in-class computer vision technologies enable companies to streamline the process of taking laser scans of existing conditions and translate them into fully functional BIMs and reduce reworks.

ClearEdge3D has applied its industry experience to the problem of “out of tolerance” construction work and developed Verity, the first automated reality capture-enabled construction quality assurance tool. Verity works with the Autodesk Navisworks, pulling and pushing information to allow for the simultaneous analysis of each element individually concerning the SOW and the project. The software compares scans of the as-constructed conditions in the field to the 3D-coordinated models by using hundreds of thousands of measurements per element for a detailed and complete quality check of the object’s conformance to the design and tolerance.

Using this methodology, Verity can provide detailed variances between the location where the item was installed and where it was supposed to be installed. The software also generates heat maps of the points against the as-designed geometry to visualize rotational variances, and against the as-built geometry to look for deformation of the object. Verity dramatically reduces the financial impact of poorly constructed work by identifying out of tolerance or missing elements early in the process. This results in reduced risk, more profitable construction projects, more accurate as-builts, and fewer schedule delays. Further, clients can export the as-built position of each element from Verity to the Navisworks model to run clash detection to understand the impact of installation errors on future work.

In an instance, DPR Construction, a California based construction management firm required to complete the construction of a multi-storey building whose cement slab was laid and steel embed bolts were installed by a prior contractor. Project participants were concerned that errors made in embedding the steel bolts at grade had negatively impacted building of the steel structure above. The client ran ClearEdge3D’s Verity to complete the analysis of the steel beams to tolerance, generating a detailed report showing variances for each steel member. DPR was able to identify more than 50 percent of steel members were out of tolerance with 45 of those elements requiring re-design or in-field modification. Verity substantially reduced the risk of schedule delay by identifying problems early in the project.

Moving ahead with their vision to eliminate errors, the company is working towards creating hardware that can ensure that the installations are done in the right place the first time itself. “This way our clients can automatically validate the work in the field with real-time feedback as they are installing the work,” concludes Cone.