In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the hottest keyword firing up the construction industry is smart construction.
Smart construction is a concept that fuses the latest ICT—drones, big data, AI, IoT, and more—with traditional civil engineering and building technologies. Major smart construction technologies currently in use or set to be used in the near future include BIM design, drone surveying, IoT-based construction management, and modularization. The reason smart construction has emerged as the most important issue in the global construction industry is that it is seen as almost the only way to solve the industry’s long-standing problems of low productivity and low profitability.
The construction industry accounts for 13% of global GDP and grows 3.6% every year, yet its productivity grows by a mere 1% annually—a serious situation compared with manufacturing’s 3.6%. Its profit margin is also only 4.4%, very low compared with other sectors.
Convergence with ICT—namely smart construction—is being cited as a way to innovate construction’s productivity and profitability. Although reports show that the level of digitalization is proportional to productivity and growth, construction’s level of digitalization is the lowest across all industries; the only industries less digitalized than construction are agriculture and hunting.
Under this reasoning, advanced countries led by the United States are seeing a growing number of cases that have already adopted smart construction technologies, and the Korean government has also established a ‘Smart Construction Technology Roadmap’ to prepare for the rapidly approaching smart construction era.
Many ideas and technologies related to smart construction are being proposed, but for various reasons they are difficult to deploy in the field, and the smart construction technology being adopted on-site the fastest in practice is the drone. According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, among the world’s major smart construction technologies, construction drones show a growth rate of 51.7%, far surpassing the 19.3% of BIM in second place.
So what does the drone mean for the construction industry? Carta, the contech startup I run, views the convergence of construction and drones as an innovation in spatial data collection.
Drones make it possible to rapidly collect information across a wide construction site, greatly reducing the time and cost of the conventional surveying stage. A site that takes 2–3 weeks to survey using traditional methods can be finished in 1–4 days by adopting drones.
Drones also make process management and communication highly efficient. Using construction drone data platforms such as the Carta platform or DroneDeploy, sites can be tracked very easily, and diverse stakeholders—clients, developers, and contractors—can monitor the site in real time simultaneously and communicate.
Because of these many advantages, world-class construction and CM firms such as Vinci, ACS, Bechtel, and Key have already adopted drones and are actively using them. Domestic construction firms also attempted to adopt drones, but because the drone data platforms were all foreign-made and too difficult to use, on-site diffusion was not easy. Recently, however, domestic platforms such as the Carta platform have begun to emerge, and thanks to the steady efforts of construction firms, drones are spreading across Korea’s construction industry as well.
Given that many smart construction technologies presuppose the digitalization of the construction site, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that drones form the foundation of all smart construction technologies. For the sake of the future of Korea’s construction industry in the smart construction era, I hope to see drones flying over even more construction sites.
