Automation is coming for the construction industry. Autonomous drills and dozers, ones that operate without a human operator inside the machine, are already making their way into common practice in the mining industry. Other companies such as Built Robotics have created fully autonomous excavators that are used to drive H-Piles for solar fields.

Both mine drilling and solar field pile installation have a few similarities that make the operations obvious choices for automation. Both solar field piles and mine drill & blast must repeat the same action hundreds of times over a large wide open greenfield site with few people around. These work items are not taking place around a variety of other trades, often the pile or drill rigs are the only machines onsite. I believe that there is another task that would be a great candidate for a similar type of automation

What are Wick Drains

Wick drains are used to reduce the amount of time it takes for fine grained soils to consolidate. Wick drains are installed to consistent depths and locations over generally a wide-open area in soft soils such as clays and silts. Once the wick drains are installed, a soil surcharge load is placed on top of the area. The surcharge loadings increase the loading on the water that is trapped in the space between the soils. Since water can not be compressed, it will look for a path where it is not being compressed. The wick drains create a path for this trapped water to make its way to the surface removing the water from the pore space in the soils and allowing their cohesive interactions to strengthen and as a result the entire soil mass is stronger

Wick drains usually involve 2 people, an operator who is driving the wicks into the soil using a modified excavator and a ground man who is in charge of cutting the wick, placing the metal drive cap on the wick and replacings the wick rolls when the machine runs out.

How to Automate Wick Drains

For wick drains to be automated, very few advanced systems would be needed. A GPS position on the wick driver to verify it is installing the wick in the correct location, a depth encoder to ensure that the wick is installed to the correct depth, and an automated wick cutter and capper. Arguably the hardest system would be the automated cut and cap mechanism, as the other systems have been used in countless other proven automated machines.

The wick installer could then install the wicks using only 1 person: a mechanic that would fuel, add more wick rolls and grease the machine. Wicks could then be installed almost 23 hours a day with two 30-minute downtime periods for maintenance and fuel. This drastically increases productivity thus decreasing costs. The high initial cost of outfitting the machine would be paid off over the long term due to the cost savings from eliminating labor needs. Another potential savings is due to the reallocation of labor within the company. Operators - especially of drill rigs - are often hard to find. By investing in automation, an operator is now free to work on other jobs that may not be able to be automated.

Overall, wick drains seem like the next logical step in construction automation. The reason that it has not been explored yet is likely due to the niche nature of installing wick drains.