Onsite quality check for installation of prefabricated wall panels using laser scanning

Abstract

Prefabricated construction has gained increasing popularity to meet the needs of rapid city development in recent years. Installation quality check is a critical task in prefabricated construction, and currently mostly still carried out manually, which is slow and ineffective. To provide an efficient and practical quality check method to replace the current manual method, this paper elaborates on an approach for checking prefabricated wall panels using laser scanning. The approach is validated in an actual case study. A common laser scanner BLK 360 is adopted to collect onsite 3D scenes after panel installation. The point clouds collected are co-roistered, classified, and segmented. Geometric parameters such as angles and distances allow for determining whether the installation meets the quality requirement. The outcome is compared with the quality check results using the conventional manual method. The results show that the panels, which need rectification, are correctly identified by the proposed approach. The major contribution of this study is determining the set of segmentation parameters to be adopted in similar quality check-up procedures. A practical and efficient quality check process is also proposed and can be readily implemented for certain prefabricated elements in many construction cases.