Applicability of as-built 3-D sensing technologies for improved efficiency when supplying joinery products

• Published in: Wood material science and engineering 2016
• Main Authors: Forsman, Samuel, Laitila, Lars
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Träteknik; Wood Science and Engineering
• ISSN: 1748-0280; 1748-0272

With currently used surveying methods, the on-site assembly of joinery products often consumes half the supplier budget. Due to spatial uncertainties, the manual product-to-room fitting of components is a major consumer of time and labour resources. With reliable as-built construction site geometrical information, this fitting could be moved to the design stage early in the supplier process. In this study, the currently used manual surveying methods were compared with two different 3-D sensing surveying methods, a portable wire-bound coordinate measuring machine (CMM) and a laser-scanning machine. The comparison evaluates the applicability of the on-site surveying methods and their potential for improving the current surveying process, moving the product-to-room fitting to the design stage. Results show that currently used manual surveying methods leave uncertainties regarding the dimensions of a construction site and are insufficient for moving the product-to-room fitting to the design stage. CMM surveying has the potential to supply coordinate registrations on a par with desired accuracy requirements, but it has limitations at the practically possible detailing level. Laser scanning seems to be applicable for the surveying for a joinery products supplier, but the accurate and detailed 3-D reconstruction of the point cloud data is difficult and requires extensive processing. It can be concluded that the concept of digitized measurement of the as-built spatial dimensions of a construction site to enable product-to-room during the design stage has the potential to succeed with currently available digitizing technologies, but that some challenges remain.