Together with ArgosDyne's Unmanned Drone Station
Unveiling a Fully Automated Construction Site Progress Management System
Meissa took part in the 2nd Korea Drone Expo, held from the 16th to the 18th in the Yeouido Park area. Hosted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, the Ministry of Science and ICT, and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy to encourage the growth of the various drone industries, the event featured a range of drone experiences and exhibitions, along with performance reports on drone demonstration cities and on the demonstration outcomes of regulatory sandbox operators. Selected last year as one of 13 drone regulatory sandbox operators, Meissa formed a consortium and unveiled a fully automated construction site progress management system.
The Drone Demonstration City and Regulatory Sandbox project, hosted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and organized by the Korea Institute of Aviation Safety Technology, is a ‘testbed for innovation’ aimed at encouraging the development of an innovative drone industry and establishing optimized related regulatory measures. By easing certain regulations, it allows drone research and demonstration to be carried out freely.
Selected this past May by the government as one of 13 drone regulatory sandbox operators, Meissa is an innovative startup that has developed its own engine to reconstruct drone-captured images into three-dimensional models with the same scale and coordinate system as reality. ArgosDyne, which co-formed the Meissa Consortium, is likewise a startup developing unmanned drone stations; it possesses outstanding drone system integration development capabilities such as unmanned drone takeoff and landing and automatic charging using LTE networks, and it has a track record of carrying out drone regulatory sandbox projects in 2019–2020.
▲Objectives of the Meissa Consortium for the 2021 Drone Regulatory Sandbox Project
Through this sandbox project, the Meissa Consortium set out the research objective of automating the entire construction site progress management process, including the data acquisition stage. Until then, Meissa had been providing ‘Meissa Flight,’ an automated drone route-flight app that lets construction sites collect drone data on their own even without a skilled drone pilot. However, there was a limitation: the automation of the drone data acquisition process could not be advanced further because of the drone visual line-of-sight flight principle stipulated in <Article 129 of the Aviation Safety Act>.
▲Among current regulations related to unmanned aircraft, the pilot's visual line-of-sight flight principle (last row)
Accordingly, from May to November 2021, the Meissa Consortium jointly developed an unmanned station-based automatic drone image capture algorithm and an automatic transmission function for the acquired site data, and completed demonstrations at one building construction site and one civil engineering site, each under way by Hyundai Engineering & Construction.
The demonstration details are as follows. When a hangar-type drone station is placed at a construction site and a flight schedule is entered so that site data can be acquired periodically, the drone automatically performs flights according to that schedule. If there is a previous flight history, the drone can fly along a route optimized for each site, and remote manual flight is also possible through the connected LTE network. After completing its flight mission, the drone returns to the station on its own, charges its battery, and transmits the data to the Meissa platform for image analysis.
The image data transmitted to the cloud-based ‘Meissa Platform’ is reconstructed through the ‘Meissa Engine’ into a coordinate-system-based three-dimensional model with the same scale as reality. Using this 3D model, construction site progress management can be automated through features such as automatic earthwork volume calculation, automatic CAD conversion, automatic BIM conversion and alignment, and automatic status report generation. Beyond progress management, real-time safety management using mobile-based location monitoring data also becomes possible.
The automated construction site management process, comprising the three stages of drone data acquisition, three-dimensional model reconstruction, and a site management platform, is provided as a web browser application powered by cloud servers, so that any member of a construction site or of the head office can access and use it anytime, anywhere.
In particular, Hyundai Engineering & Construction, where this research demonstration was conducted, is credited with having built a highly complete smart construction control system by integrating this drone data process into its own ‘Remote Site Management Platform,’ which is linked with smart glasses technology. Building on these research results, the Meissa Consortium plans to further strengthen the safety of Hyundai E&C’s integrated solution and, through full-scale domestic and international deployment, to advance a fully automated construction drone industry.
Through this regulatory sandbox project, the Meissa Consortium confirmed the outlook that drones, smart construction technology, and ICT more broadly can serve as excellent solutions for easing labor shortages and boosting productivity at construction sites. Fully automated remote site management, once realized only in science fiction films, may not necessarily be a story of the distant future.
