PRESS RELEASE: The School of Civil Engineering and the Built Environment, at Liverpool John Moores University, leads the way with ‘robot dog’ investment.

LJMU is the first university in Europe to acquire Spot and the 3D Laser Scanner with software as a package and plans to use its £150k investment for teaching and research.

Engineers at LJMU have gone out and bought a dog!

It’s four-legged and likes a little walk but ‘Spot’ won’t be barking or looking for cuddles because it’s a robot dog designed for all terrains and ideal for construction and civil engineering surveys.

Supplied and adapted by BuildingPoint UK and Ireland (the construction arm of Liverpool based mapping and surveying equipment specialists, KOREC), the robot dog has been developed by American robotics company, Boston Dynamics, in conjunction with Trimble who are the manufacturers of Spot’s 3D Laser Scanner payload. The end result is an agile, fully autonomous, four-legged robot that can be used to enter buildings which are unsafe for humans or to survey building projects as they progress.

The robot dog can either undertake fully autonomous pre-programmed missions or can even be operated remotely and controlled off-site. Both options will ensure that Spot is a perfect fit for survey requirements in hazardous conditions or for carrying out repetitive survey tasks, freeing up a skilled surveyor to work elsewhere.

Sam Hough, BuildingPoint UK and Ireland Business Manager, said: Read more

Success at the 2022 Construction Computing Awards

The 10th November saw the winners of the 2022 Construction Computing Awards announced at the Leonardo Royal Hotel in London City. Over 200 guests gathered to see the outcome of the readers’ online voting and the judging panel’s deliberations.

And of course BuildingPoint UK Ireland was right in the thick of it!

Sam Hough (Business Manager) and Abel Varela Abelleira (Senior Applications Engineer) were delighted to be guests on the Trimble table which saw four awards picked up during the evening including a joint effort with Building Point UK and Ireland!

🏆 Best use of Digital Technology in a Construction Project: Trimble Buildings with Boston Dynamics Spot Robot at BAM Nuttall Ltd with BuildingPoint UK and Ireland.
You can read all about BAM Nuttall and Spot here.

The newly established BuildingPoint UK and Ireland team was also runner-up in Team of the Year 2022 reflecting the great work they’ve done in this short space of time.

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The value of synchronised construction in delivering projects

It’s been great to see technological advances within construction over the last decade or so, with BIM software in particular having become a central part of the industry. However, software is in many ways just a part of the story, with digital hardware also having a critical and valuable role to play in helping deliver projects safely, efficiently and productively.

Building Point UK and Ireland’s Sam Hough was delighted to team up with Trimble Technical Manager, Steve Jackson, to put together this informative piece that’s just been featured on the Trimble Tekla website and also by New Civil Engineer.

Synchronised construction

When it comes to synchronised construction, digital hardware can be the second piece of the jigsaw, helping to take the 3D model from the drawing office to the site. All too often, companies will invest time, money and resources in building a constructible 3D model, packed full of information and project-rich data. And yet, when it comes to setting out and building the structure on site, this same data will be reduced into a mere A1 page 2D drawing or General Arrangement plan. With this at odds with the data-rich 3D model, it’s clear that you’re inevitably going to lose some value along the way.

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