# Automated Data Acquisition in Construction with Remote Sensing Technologies
## 6 Summery and Concluding Remarks  
Cost overrun and schedule delays are common problems, frequently leading to disputes and costly claims in the delivery of construction projects. Real-time progress reporting could address these issues by providing more timely and accurate information about activities on construction jobsites. Such timely reporting would enable decision makers and project managers to mitigate issues that give rise to the cost and schedule problems referred to above by making the schedule updating, progress reporting, and productivity analyses more frequent and accurate over project delivery period. Conventional systems for progress tracking, however, are usually manual, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and not accurate enough. In this way, automated data acquisition on site has been proposed by many researchers in order to have more robust and timely information to address the issues mentioned above. To do so, various studies have proposed the employment of different remote sensing technologies and their integrations in order to have a more automated data acquisition system. The selection of the technologies varies based on various factors such as the application, the required accuracy and the scale of a project. This study has investigated the advantageous and limitations of using these technologies by considering the applications required in construction industry.  
Indoor progress tracking has also been investigated recently by some researchers. However, indoor tracking of resources and activities have some difficulties associated with a wide range of materials and structural objects that needs to be recognized. Besides, available remote sensing technologies with applications in indoor progress reporting (e.g., RFID, UWB, laser scanning, photogrammetry, etc.) have some limitations that may affect their performance in a confined area. In fact, vision-based technologies such as laser scanning and photogrammetry or their integration are good choices to generate point cloud data. However, they need post processing steps for 3D modeling which is manual and time consuming. Besides, the geo-referencing of the system during data collection really matters for having a more accurate data registration. In this way, the use of tracking technologies such as RTS and UWB with good localization accuracy can help to facilitate these problems and to have a more automated system for 3D modeling.  
The fusion of the data acquired from various RS technologies and with other technologies has also been investigated as a solution to overcome the limitations of each technology. The activity-based approaches for progress reporting, is another area of interest in recent studies which enable us to not only track activities related to the moving objects but also to track activities which do not have such traceable objects. Finally, the registration of the data acquired by various RS technologies with available building models (e.g., 3D CAD, BIM, etc.) also needs more investigation in future.  
This research received no external funding.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.