Use case · Duct, manhole and restoration
Duct, manhole and restoration, captured as built
Once the trench is backfilled and the surface is restored, the buried work is invisible. SmartBuild captures the quality of every duct, manhole and restoration patch at the moment it is built, so an issue is caught while it still costs one visit to fix, not ten at audit.
Get a demo →The cost of finding out late
Backfill hides the work
A duct, a manhole, a restored trench surface: once the soil goes back in, the quality of that work is no longer visible. The wrong duct color or missing warning tape, an under-depth manhole, a splice or clamp that was skipped, a patch that was never properly compacted. None of it shows on a finished street.
So it surfaces later, in the worst place to find it. An invoice gets rejected. An audit raises a penalty. The network degrades, or a crew has to dig multiple pits to find an asset nobody recorded precisely. The frame is simple: an issue caught at the moment of construction costs one visit to fix; the same issue found months later, under a restored surface, costs many times more.
What gets captured
Each buried asset, proven at the action
- 01
Duct color and warning tape
Computer vision validates the duct color and confirms the warning tape is present, captured in the open trench before backfill.
- 02
Depth, splice and clamp
The manhole frame is captured and checked for depth, splice presence and clamp, so the chamber is proven complete before it is sealed.
- 03
Manhole-cover condition
The cover condition is captured at handover, recording the finished state of the chamber as part of the same evidence trail.
- 04
Last-mile cable clips
The presence of last-mile cable clips is confirmed from the image, so the final run is recorded as fixed the way it was specified.
Auto-fill, not manual entry
The camera fills the record, not a person
SmartBuild auto-fills from the captured image rather than asking a crew to type values in. The system reads what the camera saw: dimensions from a manhole frame, counts and presence from the run. With no manual entries to fabricate and duplicate-photo detection on every capture, the evidence is anti-tamper by construction.
Every capture is geo-tagged and CORS-corrected, and the whole flow runs fully offline. Crews work where there is no signal, capture locally, and the record syncs at the end of the day with zero data loss.
The buried asset, proven before the soil goes back.
Duct into manhole, manhole into a framed capture, restoration patched in. Each step is validated at the action and tied to its exact location, so the record stands once the surface is restored and the work disappears.
How SmartBuild captures it
Validated in sequence, not reconstructed in an office
SmartBuild is compliance-first: every safety measure, joint, manhole and restoration is captured at the action, not rebuilt later from memory. The workflow is locked, so the next step opens only after the prior evidence validates, and computer vision checks each capture as it lands. The map is the interface; the evidence is the property of the work itself.
The numbers below are technical performance targets for the platform, not customer results. SmartBuild is in build, and these are the capture standards it is built to.
What capturing before backfill changes
- 01
Issues caught at one-visit cost
A wrong duct color, a missing clamp or an under-depth manhole is flagged while the trench is still open, before backfill turns it into an audit-time excavation.
- 02
An invoice the record backs up
The evidence for each buried asset is captured at the action, so what was built and what is billed point to the same validated record.
- 03
A precise record for the next dig
Each asset is tied to a sub-5cm location target, so a future fault can be located without digging multiple pits to find your own buried plant.
Where this stands
Proven as concepts, building toward v1
The computer-vision checks behind this use case are proven. Duct color and tape, manhole depth, splice and clamp, manhole-cover condition and last-mile cable clips are among the use cases validated as proofs of concept, with trench restoration on the pipeline as a roadmap item. SmartBuild itself is in active build toward its first version, so these are capture standards and validated concepts, not deployed customer results.
See buried-asset capture on your own build.
Walk through how SmartBuild proves duct, manhole and restoration quality before backfill, with our team.
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