Higher Education: The Story Behind Skand’s Drone/Machine Learning Envelope Inspection
Emily Pollock posted on October 29, 2018 |
Skand founder Brett Chilton presents his company’s envelope inspection to the Year in Infrastructure jury. (Image courtesy of Bentley.)
An Australian startup with fewer than 10 employees developed an award-winning envelope inspection that uses machine learning to find and classify defects based on drone footage. Skand mapped an entire university campus’ building envelope without needing to put a single worker up on a building rooftop, creating a complex and easily searchable 3D mesh map.
“What does this mean?” asked Skand Founder Brett Chilton during his presentation at Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure awards. “Well, it leads to a safer and more productive building, across all metrics.”
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) wanted a building envelope inspection project for its Brunswick campus, which covers six buildings and 65,000 square meters. The university wanted a project that would incorporate drone imagery of the buildings’ roofs and walls, and which would catalog and attach a priority system to any defects that were identified. Additionally, the school wanted a system that would interface with its 40-year-old, award-winning asset life-cycle program.
Several aspects of the project made it tricky to complete. The most difficult factor was site access, which was restricted both by the fact that…