Automated geometric quality inspection of prefabricated housing units using BIM and LiDAR

Abstract

Traditional quality inspection of prefabricated components is labor intensive, time-consuming, and error prone. This study developed an automated geometric quality inspection technique for prefabricated housing units using building information modeling (BIM) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR). The proposed technique collects the 3D laser scanned data of the prefabricated unit using a LiDAR which contains accurate as-built surface geometries of the prefabricated unit. On the other hand, the BIM model of the prefabricated unit contains the as-designed geometries of the unit. The scanned data and BIM model are then automatically processed to inspect the geometric quality of individual elements of the prefabricated units including both structural and mechanical elements, as well as electrical and plumbing (MEP) elements. To validate the proposed technique, experiments were conducted on two prefabricated bathroom units (PBUs). The inspection results showed that the proposed technique can provide accurate quality inspection results with 0.7 mm and 0.9 mm accuracy for structural and MEP elements, respectively. In addition, the experiments also showed that the proposed technique greatly improves the inspection efficiency regarding time and labor. © 2020 by the authors.