It’s early morning, the sun’s hardly up. You’ve just arrived at your job site, and you’re gearing up for meetings before the day’s construction starts in earnest. You’re securing any and all safety gear when a little-tracked vehicle the size of a toy dump truck drives by. It looks like a miniature tank. The sensor on the top of its chassis tracks over and past you. A lithe drone about the same size hovers overhead. Your job site is buzzing with little robots, and they’ve been working all night.

That’s one future that Doxel, a California-based construction robotics startup, is trying to achieve. Whether they, in particular, are successful is anyone’s guess, but no one can deny the allure of automation. What aspect of commerce or industry couldn’t do with the reduction of repetitive or monotonous tasks performed by robots that don’t need to eat or sleep? Well, they do need to recharge and they do need frequent maintenance.

The drones and robots that Doxel is creating aim to serve construction project teams better, to help them make more intelligent and informed decisions. Each drone uses deep learning algorithms to process and collate enormous amounts of data from its sensors. The task is very difficult, but essentially it is the drone’s job to take the four-dimensional model of a building (a 3D space over time) and turn it into non-graphical reports, models, or sets of information that a project team can use to make decisions about a construction project. The data and resulting information set one drone can produce can be combined, and there you have it! A small fleet of robots are now your coworkers.

These kinds of innovations are important considerations that the Canadian construction industry need to invest wisely in years ahead of time. That doesn‚Äôt mean investing in Doxel directly, rather an acknowledgment that improved automation will be one of the hallmarks of the 21st century when we look back, and now is the time to prepare. The specter of mass layoffs and lost jobs due to robots is ever-present, but construction sites will still need human inspectors, and they will likely need specialists and maintenance personnel as well. Anyone who’s had to un-stuck their Roomba Robot Vacuum out of the drapes will know how comically and severely robots can also fail. No one should deny their potential, however. If autonomous drones can give project teams early warning signs and new perspectives that allow offsets or delays to be mitigated, these are emerging technologies worth getting excited about.

For more information please visit Doxel Ai [:]

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