Do some employees slack off at your job? May be you are the guy or gal that does the slacking off. However, for some construction workers, any thoughts of slacking off could soon seem rather quaint. The drones will almost certainly notice...
The workers building a lavish new downtown stadium for the Sacramento Kings in California are being monitored by aerial drones and software that will automatically flag slow progress or even loitering by employees. During the day, a drone automatically "patrols" the Sacramento work site collecting video footage. "That footage is then converted into a three-dimensional picture of the site, which is fed into software that compares it to computerized architectural plans as well as a the construction work plan showing when each element should be finished. The software can show managers how the project is progressing, and can automatically highlight parts that may be falling behind schedule." Efficient, creepy, or both?
What comes to mind is that scene from the terrible film "Battlefield Earth", when the forced workers have to hurry back to mining when their alien overlord's drones fly over to see if they are working. What are the positives to this besides possibly getting projects done quicker? Well, there is a big one.
The generated 3D images will show that a particular structural element is behind schedule, perhaps because materials have not yet arrived or those sections being understaffed. Using drones, project foremen can understand why deviations are happening, and they can see where efficiency improvements can be made,
Recently, the New York Times published a scathing article of Amazon.com mainly because of their practices of monitoring white collar workers using software and metrics that aren't being as productive as they could or should be. We all know that guy or gal at work that isn't doing their fair share, but management isn't quiet able to see it. This project highlights the way new technologies allow manual work to be monitored and scrutinized in the same way. "A report published in 2009 by the National Research Council of the National Academies found that construction lags behind other industries such as manufacturing in terms of productivity, and blamed the situation on problems with planning, coӧrdination, and communication." Hopefully, drones will be part of the solution to this problem.
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