In a sign of continued interest in technologies for tracking work progress and keeping on schedule, Israel-based startup Buildots announced that it has raised $60 million in a Series C funding round.

In recent years contractors have seen the advantages of employing light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology with unmanned aerial systems (UAS), also known as drones.

As more images and reality captures come in from jobsites, the work of blending that data with existing digital twins can be onerous.

Digital twins are often touted because of their use for owners and facilities managers, but what about a digital twin for contractors that documents the ever-changing work site?

Keeping track of construction progress is often a matter of waiting for engineers and site supervisors to walk the site and document it when they can. Getting that data into the general project pipeline is a challenge in itself.

The dog-shaped Spot robot from Boston Dynamics will be available next year with a Trimble laser scanner and GNSS antenna built in, for an out-of-the box autonomous reality capture on jobsites.

“Ideas and solutions are the easy part,” says Ricardo Khan, senior director of innovation at Mortenson Construction. It’s “the process” that is the real challenge. Khan’s midday keynote captured one of the key themes of the second day of the virtual ENR FutureTech conference—the need to identify the problems in your construction process before you start throwing technology at them

It's not enough to practice virtual design and construction anymore. Today's contractors must develop an effective data strategy beyond individual projects.

In a best-case scenario, successful and often incremental research gradually evolves into products intended to solve  construction problems.