Structures Division

Construction Metrology and Automation Group 

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Research Programs LADAR: Laser Radar Comp-TRAK: Manufactured Component Tracking Recognition of Manufactured Components SensorView and LiveView: Construction Communication Protocols NLS: Non-Line-of-Sight Metrology   Products Publications Downloads   Staff Working With Us Contact Us CMAG Home

William C. Stone, PhD, P.E. Leader, Construction Metrology and Automation Group   Current Research In FY01 I am involved with four projects and serve as the PI for the first three listed below. All of them deal with solving technical problems currenty preventing fully integrated and automated construction. In the first project Procedures and Metrics for Construction Range Imaging and Registration with Geraldine Cheok, Christoph Witzgall, and Javier Bernal we seek to develop procedures for NIST-traceable artifact calibration of laser radar and other range image sensors. This class of sensor is seeing considerable attention at present both for excavation site characterization as well as for automated as-built status determination. The research work is analogous to that of other weights and measures services provided by NIST. The objective in this case is to develop both individual 3D artifacts and artifact scenes and to establish high accuracy "ground truth" representations. These in turn can be used to calibrate secondary (portable) standards for use by industry as well as to provide blind 3D data sets for testing of third party algorithms for both meshing and object recognition. Many construction firms now use barcodes to track the arrival of materials at a job site. Some are now investigating the use of RFID tags for work package manifesting and for tracking of trade labor that enters and leaves a site. In the project NIST Comp-TRAK: Measurement Processes and Metrics for Construction Component Tracking with Karen Furlani, Larry Pfeffer, and Dewitt Latimer, we seek to develop NIST-traceable calibration and registration procedures for large-scale coordinate measurement systems. In the project Enhanced Construction Object Recognition Through Sensor Fusion, with Karen Furlani and Geraldine Cheok we will be combining concepts developed in the CompTRAK program with our laser radar research to develop hybrid long-range automated identification technologies for manufactured component identification. These will provide a standard measure of accuracy for point-to-point as-built data collected from construction sites. The explosive growth of e-commerce demands common communications protocols. At present there are no such protocols for getting digital information to and from the construction job site. In the research project NIST LiveView and NIST SensorView: Site Measurement System Communication Standards and Practices with Larry Pfeffer (PI) and DeWitt Latimer, we are developing two such protocols. The SensorVIEW protocol allows for a common uplink packet from live, manual and automated sensors residing at the job site. These sensors relay raw data in the form of three dimensional survey coordinates, part and machinery orientations, part IDs and a host of other information to a local server. The LiveVIEW protocol transmits derived information from a local server to a central time-tagged project database. Work is currently underway to develop both protocols to handle most point-to-point and image sensor data classes.   Bio | Publications | Lectures | Research | Contact info

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