The Civil Engineering Contractor September 2018 | Page 28

TECHNOLOGY
likely that ‘jobs’ will not disappear.
Some jobs in construction involve
repetitive manual labour and
elsewhere in the world these are
increasingly being automated.
Labour and political issues aside,
this trend is likely to arrive in South
Africa. We are seeing the emergence
of robots and automated technology
capable of handling certain tasks,
such as robotic masonry and brick
laying. These will be integrated into
projects over the next few years.
It is the nature of jobs that will
change, and they may not require
the same type of person. In many
cases, they could even bring about
an improvement in job satisfaction
for workers, as unpleasant aspects
of their jobs get done by a robot,
working as a colleague. Certain
management tasks are not expected
to be automated at all. What is clear
is that new skills are needed.
There will most likely not be
enough appropriately skilled
workers in the civil engineering
industry if digitalisation happens
quickly. These skills of the future
come much more naturally to
young people, virtually breastfed
on tablets, GPS, smartphones, and
cloud computing. There is a clear
opportunity to attract into the
construction industry more young
people, and more women too, as
perceptions of the work being too
physically difficult will no longer
be valid. nn
procedures before they are needed
and predicted,” says Dr Gast.
Software enables a more cost-
effective design, integrating the best
materials. “When seeking the ideal
location for a dam, for instance,
we can today use NASA imaging
technology and infrared to locate
a borehole field and groundwater.
That considerably narrows down
the exploration process. Drones
can narrow it down even more,
inspecting local conditions and
contours for a dam. This negates
the need for land surveying — even
with their previously state-of-the-
art mechanical and electro-optical-
mechanical devices — and achieve
the same result in a tenth of the
conventional time.
“Take a 30km pipeline being
built: our drones, with the relevant
software and optical attachments,
can do in half an hour what it would
take an engineer in a day of travel,”
explains Dr Gast.
Retraining required
Digitalisation is already having an
impact on construction jobs. Newer
concrete processes and the latest
blasting processes enable a job to be
done by fewer workers. Productivity
will continue to increase through
automation. The exact consequences
on the workforce are not yet known,
as it is anticipated that while some
familiar and manual tasks might
eventually disappear altogether, it is
than it used to be, and innovations
have occurred in a number of
areas: materials; application
techniques; and concept. Each of
these is a science in itself, and
most improvements are incremental
rather than disruptive — although it
may appear to be disruptive.”
In aggregate, they amount
to a veritable revolution and
developments are conducted
quite differently to the old style
of surveyors stomping around
the sweltering veld with a
measuring tape, spirit or dumpy
level, theodolite, and compass.
GPS technology has been around
some time, and it made sense to
introduce this functionality into
many construction tasks — just
as almost every other industry has
deployed it. Such tasks include
surveying, measuring the grade,
elevation, staking, mapping and
site exploration, and conditional
analysis.
“Today, drone technology can
analyse any surface and point out
site errors in contours and walls
and can detect possible areas of
danger in infrastructure projects
after installation. It can detect
and measure a fold or leak in
the geomembranes of a dam, a
suspected seam, or welding error.
Our AI has the ability to process
up to 10 000 images per second
coupled to conditional analysis. We
are even able to verify intervention
Applying the Shotcrete.
26 - CEC September 2018
Concrete itself is regarded as a
high-tech product, says Johan van Wyk,
director of the Southern Africa
Ready-mix Association (Sarma).