A new construction tech partnership will soon bring robotic dogs to the worksite.

Zepth, a construction industry solution provider, has formed a new collaboration with Boston Dynamics that will blend Zepth’s intelligent technology with the data collection capabilities of Spot, the robotic dog developed by Boston Dynamics.

The combination will allow users to draw information from captured data to enhance efficiency, productivity, and collaboration throughout each phase of a project lifecycle.

“I founded Zepth to address the widespread inefficiencies and communication lapses across the construction industry that ultimately lead to project delays and financial losses,” said Prasoon Shrivastava, Founder and CEO of Zepth.

“By integrating Spot into our system, we have an opportunity to truly revolutionize the site monitoring process and the industry at large. It is another step towards unifying the field with the office, particularly during an age of social distancing and remote working.”

Despite being one of the largest global industries, the construction sector struggles with outdated, inefficient, and disjointed technologies. Traditional site progress reporting requires human workers to manually capture data with cameras, resulting in differences in angles and light variations. The worker then uploads and manually organizes the data in a hard drive, cloud server, or service such as Dropbox, distributing the data to team members via email or a shared folder. Separate tools are needed to identify and annotate issues, create snag lists, assign tasks to team members, and track their resolution. The lengthy process can require upwards of eight or more separate tools and systems to catalogue, share, and analyze information, resulting in scattered communications, lack of transparency, and delays.

Spot’s autonomous, terrain-agnostic capabilities support the dynamic nature of the construction site and enable a standardized, precise data collection process. The project team can map a defined route for Spot to regularly and repeatedly capture consistent data, and the robot’s ability to traverse rough terrain and adapt to changing weather conditions allows it to safely capture as-built conditions on the site, even in hazardous and hard-to-reach areas. Spot can detect and pass obstacles to maintain its defined path and can be operated remotely.

Once Spot has safely and effectively captured the necessary project data, the question becomes: How is the data analyzed?

A recent study has shown that nearly 95 percent of data in the construction industry is never utilized, according to FMI Corporation.

Studies have shown that, when compared to their human counterparts, autonomous robots have the potential to improve the accuracy, consistency, and quality of reality data capture within a live construction environment

This is where Zepth and Spot believe they will stand out. Zepth enables project teams to transform data into deeper insights about the project and drive data-driven decisions in real time, demonstrating how data can drive performance. Zepth360, the visual progress reporting module of Zepth, records progress over time using 360-degree images and supporting high-resolution 2D images captured by Spot.

Users can identify snags, assign them to team members, and ssee through their resolution without ever leaving the project platform.

Spot also enables the creation of a “digital twin,” or a reconstruction of the as-built state of the building, using 3D laser scanning. By comparing the as-built reality with the as-planned execution in BIM, the project team can identify discrepancies early on and take corresponding corrective actions.

The collaboration with Spot and Boston Dynamics will empower construction teams to work remotely from any location in the world and create a living digital record of the project, generate actionable data and document progress .