Onsite 3D marking for construction activity tracking

This article presents an innovative onsite 3D marking approach for tracking the progress of construction activities using an Ultra Wide Band (UWB) positioning system. The 3D marking approach is used to track activities that could not be tracked previously using object-based tracking models, including welding and inspection activities for pipelines. A field experimentation study on an industrial-type building construction project was conducted to demonstrate the method and evaluate its performance in a construction environment and a software application was developed using MATLAB to automate the data analysis and progress estimation procedure. The results of the field experiments confirmed the feasibility of the developed 3D marking approach for tracking a number of construction activities, such as welding and inspection, which are not associated with the addition or movement of objects on a site and therefore could not be tracked using traditional object-based models.