Fueling Hexagon's Innovation in AEC and Manufacturing with BricsCAD – HexagonAB President & CEO - Ola Rollén
The BricsCAD Digital Summit 2021 opened with a keynote address by Ola Rollén, President and CEO of HexagonAB, in which he talks about the Hexagon vision on innovation and how BricsCAD fits into that vision.
This post is a transcript of his opening address delivered during the summit.
To watch the video, click here!
Mr. Ola Rollén opened the keynote with an introduction that Hexagon is a Digital Reality Solutions company. “We combine sensors, software and autonomous systems to empower an autonomous future”, said Mr. Rollén . “Now that sounds impressive and bold but let me talk a bit about autonomy. We have known automation for a long time. Automation was introduced sometime after the second world war, and it has been with us since then. But we are now moving towards autonomy, where systems work without human intervention. Let me give you an example so it is not so theoretical.
Automation is amazing, we have had the cruise control since the eighties. You push the button and the car goes down the road at a certain speed. It is great, because you don’t have to put your foot on the pedal. But, it is also dangerous because people fell asleep and the car kept on driving down the motorway at 130 kmph, and you smashed into things or cars. It created accidents. Now, in an autonomous system, and you have seen it already in sophisticated cars today, there is a system where you combine cruise control with sensors, which will sense objects ahead of you and it will brake before you react, to avoid a collision. Now, this is really where autonomy becomes smart, as opposed to automation.”
Now, what’s that got to do with Bricsys and Hexagon. Well, we believe that Hexagon and Bricsys can transform vital ecosystems. It can be anything from industrial facilities to discrete manufacturing to infrastructure to buildings and construction.
Today, we don’t have the time to go through the details of all these ecosystems so we are going to focus on what is close to you i.e design and the construction industry. The design team will also use their internal tools for planning and estimation as the construction process goes ahead. Sometimes, you have to feed it back to the design and maybe, make alterations to the original design.
Hexagon’s version of this looks somewhat like this.
We will start the design BricsCAD, we might use HxDR, which stands for Hexagon Digital Reality; we have captured most of Europe and North America in a 3D model. And, if you import your CAD designs into HxDR, you can fit the model into the real world, where you want to build the building. You can view the building from any location and make a lot of visualizations even before it is built. You can show your clients what it looks like. Now, once you are happy with the design, you export it to HxGN SmartBuild. Hexagon Smart Build is the next generation platform for construction. Hexagon Smart Build will issue work packages to everyone involved in the construction process. Hexagon Smart Build is directly connected to our sensors, which is the BLK Arc, the dog, and this can give instructions to BLK2FLY, the drone that can perform laser scanning, and capture the construction updates in real-time, in 3D, and send it back to Hexagon Smart Build, and update your BIM model in real-time. In the not-too-distant future, you will see robots (like the one in this picture) that will receive work packages and execute it on the construction field.
HxGN is closely connected to the planning suite, which we call as EcoSys and teht can do costing, quantities and can be fed back t0o BricsCAD for re-design, as required.
So , we have a seamless process of data flowing from design to execution, and this is our vision for the future, for the construction process.
Now, once the building is constructed, we can gather all the data we have collected during the construction process, we can import all of it into Infor EAM system.
It has been great introducing this to you, and I just want to underscore that we see you, our customers, as co-creators of the solutions we deliver, and we would very much like to share our developments with you, listen to you how we can improve them.
With that, I have come to the end of my brief introduction, and I hope you have a great day, together with Hexagon and Bricsys.
Blog post transcription by Rakesh Rao, Designsense Software Pvt. Ltd, India’s #1 Sales, Support and Development point for BricsCAD.