S. Korea starts demonstration for automated construction technologies at smart city

By Park Sae-jin Posted : November 1, 2021, 11:17 Updated : November 1, 2021, 11:17

[Courtesy of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport]


SEOUL -- South Korea has started the six-month demonstration of automated construction technologies including 5G-based machine guidance and machine control techniques at the central city of Sejong. The administrative city was built on a massive smart city platform which is an ideal testbed for future connected technologies.

A smart city is a city platform with its components connected via wireless networks using 4G, 5G, WiFi, and internet of things (IoT) mobile communication technologies. Various sensors and cameras are organically connected to each other and their control tower so that managers can monitor every part of smart cities in real-time.

Because of the smart city's wireless data communication capabilities, it is a perfect place to test autonomous and remote-controlled equipment such as self-driving cars, monitoring drones and construction equipment like remote-controlled tower cranes and autonomous excavators.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said in a statement that the demonstration of automated construction technologies was launched at Sejong City on November 1. The control tower will use machine guidance (MG) and machine control (MC) technologies to operate autonomous and remote-controlled heavy equipment to dig up and move 230,000 cubic meters of earth from one place to another. It would take 15,000 round trips for a 25 ton-class heavy-duty truck to move 230,000 cubic meters of earth, the ministry said.

The demonstration is part of a government project led by the Korea Land & Housing Corporation, a state corporation responsible for the development of land. The project was launched in 2018 to develop construction techniques based on three-dimensional building information modeling (BIM), a total construction management system model that maximizes productivity and work efficiency using drones and sensors for site monitoring. Data is collected and analyzed to predict the construction period and the required resources.

Thanks to extensive 4G and 5G mobile networks, South Korea can test next-generation construction techniques to popularize autonomous and remote-controlled heavy equipment. At Busan Port, the country's main maritime gateway, autonomous cargo trucks and remote-controlled tower cranes are being demonstrated.
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