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If you’ve ever renovated a commercial building, you’ve probably popped a few ceiling tiles up to see what’s above a drop ceiling. If you’re an architect or structural engineer, you need to see the structure of the building. MEP engineers are looking at where pipes, ducts, and wires run, and construction professionals need to understand both along with the structural integrity of the drop ceiling itself.
The Old Way of Looking Above Drop Ceilings
Until now, seeing above drop ceilings (also known as suspended ceilings or false ceilings) required climbing a ladder, popping the tile up, and looking around with a flashlight while trying not to fall off the ladder as you spin around looking in all directions. You may grab a few pictures with your smartphone before you climb down the ladder, move the ladder, and repeat the steps over and over.
Inspecting a drop ceiling feels like a game of whac-a-mole and you’re the mole.
Challenges Manually Inspecting a Suspended Ceiling
- Time-Consuming Process: It takes a lot of time to crawl up and down a ladder, move it, look around, and repeat it again and again.
- Limited Access: Your access depends on where you can set up a ladder, forcing you to work around desks, tables, and other equipment.
- Safety Concerns: Climbing up and down a ladder isn’t hard, but the repetition of the activity increases the likelihood of someone stumbling or tripping and often a ladder’s limited access leads people to overstretch to improve visibility.
- Minimal Visibility: What you can see is limited to the areas you can directly access from below. That can lead to uncertainty and more RFI’s or change orders.
- Poor Documentation: Even though you can take pictures from each access point, organizing them is still difficult. Piecing pictures together, matching pictures to specific locations, and sharing them with colleagues in an understandable format can be difficult.
The New Way to Inspect Drop Ceilings
With all of those challenges looking above a false ceiling, it’s no wonder why engineers and contractors have asked us to develop a safe way to inspect drop ceilings. We created a custom light ring to illuminate this dark space for our compact tracked inspection robot, the GPK-32, to traverse over the ceiling tiles with a 360° camera.
The result was a 360° video like this one that we took over our CEO’s head.
*The space between the top of the suspended ceiling and the bottom of the floor.
Benefits of Using a Robot to Inspect Drop Ceilings
- Accessibility & Visibility: Since you only need one or two access points to inspect a drop ceiling, you can see more areas, including corners and around equipment.
- Speed: See above a false ceiling much faster with a robot compared to moving a ladder around.
- Safer: By reducing the frequency of climbing up and down a ladder in a crowded environment and not needing to overstretch to see something just out of sight, you dramatically lower the potential for injury by using a robot.
- Better Documentation: A 360° camera gives you more insight into the space and makes it easier to share that information with team members and consultants.
ROI of Drop Ceiling Inspection Robots
Just doing drop ceiling inspections faster and safer provides a strong ROI. You’ll also see that having more visibility into spaces you wouldn’t have seen without a robot. Being able to share that documentation across the design and build teams leads to designing more efficiently. That means having fewer RFIs and work change orders, leading to more profitability.
Check out our drop ceiling robot and other reality capture robots.