Automated building and evaluation of 2D as-built floor plans

Abstract

Site inspection is a notably tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone process when carried out manually by construction inspectors. One portion of site inspection is the generation and comparison of as-built drawings to their as-planned counterparts to ensure conformity. Current as-built evaluation systems rely on manually positioning and transporting scanning stations around the site to collect a cohesive map of the environment and then followed by a manual assessment of the site status using the built drawings. This paper proposes an automated alternative to the generation and assessment of 2D as-built floor maps by relying on robotic simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) to build the 2D as-built maps, followed by automated evaluation of the as-built maps using machine vision. The components of the proposed system have been tested through proof of concept experiments inside 2 different constructed sites. Results indicate average errors below 4 cm (site of 30 m x 15 m) between the disparities identified by our proposed system versus ground truth measured disparities. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.