Digital Tools for Fast Mapping of Buildings

Abstract

While the construction sector embraces digitalization, new technologies related to it are spreading benefits. The need of creating a 3D model of a building, a digital copy of something existing, is not new. Mediated by the advent of photographic and laser instrumentation, the construction of a digital model has crossed the fields of surveying with increasing accuracy and precision, imposing standards of capturing the existing first and modelling then ever higher. But while the Building Information Modelling allows a virtual representation of the existing asset enriching its geometry with precious and significant information related to its properties, advanced survey has always faced the impossibility to break the surface of the building, surveying what is inside walls, thus excluding what necessary should be contained within a BIM model. Also, BIM models do not consider the real-time component and do not report the real-time behaviour of the building. In this chapter we will investigate several technologies and instruments exploited till now for the surveying and positioning of existing buildings, plants included, and a new toolkit based on AR that, coupled with sensors and visualisation tools developed by BIM4EEB, offers many advantages when surveying the whole building.