A product-oriented Product Service System for tracing materials on autonomous construction sites : A product development for today’s and future construction sites

Abstract: The global population is growing, and more people than before are moving to cities. This creates a need for increased building efficiency and possibility to work in remote environments. On today’s construction sites, there is a need to able to organize the site in a better way. In the future, autonomous vehicles will instead find it difficult to localize materials on a construction site. The autonomous vehicles can localize themselves with cameras and sensors, but they do not know how to localize the materials and items. This report is based on a project where Volvo Construction Equipment acted as a customer and the project was performed by students from Blekinge Institute of Technology and Stanford University. The prompt for this project was “From elephants to ants – from Earth to Mars” and would later be interpreted as finding a solution for the future that will be able to function without human’s intervention. From this project, this report was created. The following research questions for this report were: • How can workers locate building materials on today’s construction sites? • How will autonomous vehicles be able to locate material without human assistance in future construction sites? To solve these problems a design-process started, using an engineering design method. This method was chosen because of the type of problem. In engineering, the problem is identified to create a solution to the problem, comparing to when studying science, a question should be answered. The outcome from this report is a Product Service System (PSS) for a tracking system and a device for materials on today’s and future construction sites. When this solution was created no economic aspects were considered. Also, the focus of this report is the first steps of going from today’s construction sites to the future construction sites where autonomous vehicles will be used. The result from this research shows that the same problem of organizing a construction site is a pattern that can be seen in the majority of the sites that were visited during field works. Also, the workers today have little trust in the autonomous vehicles which is a result of lacking information and communication within companies. Furthermore, to be able to move to an autonomous future the mindset and attitude has to be changed. The collected data was analysed, and the outcome was a tracing system that will enable, both humans and machines, to localize materials on today’s and future construction sites. With this solution, today’s workers can track their materials wherever it is placed, without any need of changing the site. The autonomous vehicles will be able to use the tags to localize materials when there are no humans around.