The 30,000-sq-ft Oracle Innovation Lab on the company’s Deerfield, Ill., campus has demonstration space for construction technologies ranging from robots to drones to building automation. While it opened in 2019, the pandemic delayed any serious experiments from getting underway until April 2022.
“Our last visitor [before the pandemic] was Saudi Aramco in February 2020,” recalls Burcin Kaplanoglu, an Oracle vice president and the co-founder of the lab. That gap actually set up the success the company and its many hardware and software technology partners had this past year in running experiments and creating actionable data and results for contractors. And the plan is coming to fruition. This year the lab has seen trials of construction drones performed under NIST standards and trials of different reality-capture technologies.