TORONTO—Earlier this month, PCL and Pomerleau Construction took part in the first phase of a multi-step collaboration, bringing a ruggedized robotic dog to Cadillac Fairview’s 160 Front St. project in Toronto.
The purpose of the collaboration, which was done along with Latium, Intel and Microsoft, was to bring digital transformation and innovation to jobsites.
Pomerleau was the first construction company in the world to use the robot dog named Spot, designed by Boston Dynamics, on its jobsites in Montreal in 2019.
PCL Construction has sent Spot to a couple of its jobsites to further study and enhance how it can improve the company’s workflows.
While onsite, Spot was equipped with a number of technologies, all of which will feed data into Latium Technologies Job Site Insights (JSI) smart construction platform, states a release, adding those technologies include 360-degree cameras, a Leica RTC360 3D laser scanner and Latium Technologies environmental air quality sensors, GPS sensors and other LORA IoT based sensory as required.
Latium enabled Spot to collect data with the use of JSI, aggregating and integrating jobsite information from third party solutions and wireless IoT sensor data onto a single pane of glass, which enables jobsite personnel with real-time information to immediately respond to changing or adverse conditions and events, adds the release.
Spot also frees up teams to focus on value added tasks and get into dangerous and hard to access or confined spaces, thereby improving health and safety on jobsites.
The robot dog is also equipped with Intel and Microsoft Azure, IoT and edge computing which includes a ruggedized add-on computer, powered with Intel’s high-performance Xeon processor with Artificial Intelligence capabilities and processing power that operates the sensors and the additional components Spot carries as part of the jobsite robotic experiment.
“We are very interested to see how Spot performs autonomously and how exactly the data it collects while moving around our jobsite will complement our daily site tasks at the workface of construction,” said John Boktor, PCL’s senior manager, digital construction – business technology, in a statement. “Collaborating with our technology partners and industry peers in an effort to enable technology further and more broadly in our industry is both very exciting and rewarding.”
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