Dynamic Visualization of Construction Sites with Machine-Borne Sensors Toward Automated Earth Moving

Abstract

The digitization of the construction site environment has progressed rapidly. In this study, the operations of hydraulic excavators—which are machines widely used in the construction industry—were advanced to enable automation and unmanned operation. To achieve this, it is necessary to determine the environment of the machines at the sites, and a real-time measurement and visualization methodology that can be installed at common construction sites is required. In this study, we propose a measurement system for reconstructing a wide range of surrounding environments using machine-borne sensors mounted on a hydraulic excavator. The proposed system measures the entire surrounding environment using a sensor unit composed of a laser imaging detection and ranging (LiDAR) and a wide-angle camera. Furthermore, methods of time-series integration for wide-range and dynamic measurements during work for occlusion-robust visualization are proposed. In an experiment using actual machines on an earth-moving site, we validated the performance of our proposed system by quantitative evaluation and confirmed that the system provides an effective solution for the digitization of construction sites.