If there is anything that will gladden the hearts of concrete workers it has to be the appearance of robotic/autonomous technologies for tying rebar. One of construction’s most tedious jobs is about to get much easier.
Introduced at World of Concrete 2020, SkyMul's drone will swoop down on your rebar mat, identify each individual rebar intersection, tie it off and move on to the next.
You heard that right, a drone.
The company is a startup from the Georgia Tech Robotics Institute, and while this year they plan to subcontract the rebar-tying drone as a service to contractors, the goal is to sell the drone itself to companies in the concrete business.
According to Stefan Posey, cofounder and chief technology officer, the drone can identify rebar intersections without CAD files, site plans or manual programming. Instead it uses computer vision and machine learning to map the work area and locate the intersections autonomously.
Once the drone sees the intersection, it drops down onto the mat, wraps the two pieces of rebar with wire and takes off again for the next intersection.
