Vision-Based Equipment Pose Monitoring
This application area focuses on using visual sensing to continuously estimate and track the 3D pose (position and orientation) of large construction equipment and loads—such as tower cranes, launching gantries, and precast girders—directly from camera feeds. Instead of relying on dense networks of physical sensors, encoders, or laser scanners, the system interprets images to reconstruct equipment configuration and motion in real time. It matters because accurate, low-cost pose monitoring is a prerequisite for safer semi‑autonomous and autonomous heavy-lifting operations on job sites. By providing reliable, real-time spatial awareness in harsh construction environments, these solutions reduce manual alignment work, speed up lifting and placement tasks, and lower the risk of accidents and collisions, while avoiding expensive hardware retrofits on existing machinery.
The Problem
“Your cranes are lifting blind because you can’t see precise equipment pose in real time”
Organizations face these key challenges:
Crane and gantry operators rely heavily on line-of-sight and radio guidance, especially in cluttered or obstructed areas
Retrofitting legacy equipment with encoders, IMUs, and laser scanners is prohibitively expensive and slow to deploy
Pose data from existing sensors is fragmented, hard to calibrate, and often unreliable in harsh site conditions