Low-cost Thermal Mapping for Concrete Heat Monitoring

Robotics has been widely applied in smart constructionfor generating the digital twin or for autonomousinspection of construction sites. For example, for thermalinspection during concrete curing, continual monitoring of theconcrete temperature is required to ensure concrete strengthand to avoid cracks. However, buildings are typically too largeto be monitored by installing fixed thermal cameras, and postprocessingis required to compute the accumulated heat of eachmeasurement point. Thus, by using an autonomous monitoringsystem with the capability of long-term thermal mapping ata large construction site, both cost-effectiveness and a precisesafety margin of the curing period estimation can be acquired.Therefore, this study proposes a low-cost thermal mappingsystem consisting of a 2D range scanner attached to a consumerlevelinertial measurement unit and a thermal camera forautomated heat monitoring in construction using mobile robots.