Taking AI Inspection Indoors: Scanning a Parking Garage with the XGRIDS Portal Cam and Hammer Missions

For years, Hammer Missions has focused on exterior asset inspection, including building envelopes, façades, and drone-based surveys of structures from the outside in. Today, we're crossing the threshold and going indoors with AI for parking garage inspections. Our platform now supports full interior inspection workflows, letting engineering teams capture and assess enclosed spaces using 3D capture hardware paired with our AI inspection engine. Our first target: the parking garage.

Why parking garages deserve serious attention

Parking structures are among the most inspection-critical assets in the built environment, and it's a category many owners underestimate. Because of their construction type being large spans of exposed concrete, decks that take constant load cycling, and continuous exposure to water, road salts, and vehicle traffic, their condition needs to be tracked far more closely than most people assume. Deterioration can advance quietly, and the consequences of neglect can be severe.

The garage we scanned for this video shows the typical range of conditions: water stains across the deck, rust staining, minor cracks on columns, and areas of peeling paint. None of these are catastrophic on their own. But the point of a good inspection programme is to catch conditions early, document them accurately, and watch how they evolve so you can act at the right moment rather than reacting to a failure.

The hardware: XGRIDS Portal Cam

For this workflow we used the XGRIDs Portal Cam—a 3D capture device that combines an integrated LiDAR unit with 360° cameras. The LiDAR sensor emits light to build dense 3D point clouds of the space, while the 360° cameras continuously capture spherical imagery as you walk.

The advantage of this setup is practical: because the cameras cover a full sphere, you don't need to stop and aim the unit at each wall, column, or ceiling. You simply hold the LiDAR unit and move through the space, and you still come away with complete, high-quality 360° imagery of everything around you. The combination of dense geometry plus full visual coverage is what makes the downstream analysis so powerful.

Capturing the space on site

Walking the garage, the defects were immediately visible. Water stains across the deck were an early signal that water isn't draining correctly. Although not an emergency, it's something worth keeping an eye on. On the columns, minor cracks were worth documenting, and staining appeared in numerous places throughout the structure.

The real value of capturing all of this in 3D is that when you return to the office, you have a complete system of record: not just what the conditions are, but exactly where each one sits in the structure. And you capture it in a fraction of the time a manual survey would take. Simply walk the space and let the hardware record everything.

The key to a clean capture is a steady lawnmower pattern: systematic, overlapping parallel passes that cover the entire deck. Pace matters more than people expect. Move too fast and you risk compromising the data; move too slowly and you waste time on site. Somewhere in between is the sweet spot—and helpfully, the Hammer app will flag you in real time if you're walking too quickly.

From site to virtual 3D model

Back at the office, the workflow moves into Hammer Missions. In the Data Analysis tab you create a new project, give it a name, set the project type to Indoor and the camera type to Portal Cam, and add a short description of what you're inspecting. From there, you upload the required data: the point-cloud files from the Portal Cam scanner along with the iPhone imagery. Hammer Missions processes everything and returns a complete virtual environment.

What you get back is a full 3D scan of the garage that you can navigate freely, moving through the space as if you were in a game engine, alongside a 2D floor-deck view. The 2D view is particularly useful for reading deck-level conditions clearly, and you can switch into it directly from the 3D view whenever you want a cleaner top-down read of the slab. Together they let you see what the conditions are, where they are, and how the whole structure fits together before you annotate a single thing.

Measuring and annotating in post

This is where the combination of 3D geometry and on-site imagery really earns its place. Double-click a location in the model and Hammer Missions pulls up the photograph captured at that spot beside the 3D view. The interface is consistent across every project type so the workflow feels familiar regardless of the asset.

From there you can annotate a condition, tag it, and measure it directly off the model. In the video, a single moisture stain measured roughly 1.59 m² which is quantified in seconds, without a second trip to the site. The same applies to anything else: column heights, crack lengths, the dimensions of a feature you noticed later. Measurements no longer have to be taken on site.

That has real implications for how field time is spent. Structural assessments often require hands-on work such as sounding—tapping the concrete and marking suspect areas with chalk to flag delamination. Even those chalk markings can be measured later in post from the captured model. The result is a rebalanced workflow: more field time for the tasks that genuinely require physical presence, like sounding, and far less for visual documentation, which the Portal Cam and Hammer Missions handle quickly.

AI-powered parking garage inspections

Beyond manual markup, Hammer Missions includes an AI library for detecting common defect types, such as cracks, moisture stains, peeling paint, and more. Point it at the dataset and it surfaces instances across the entire garage for you to cross-verify. In review, the AI correctly picked up the moisture staining we'd noted on site, along with peeling paint and cracking on column paintwork. These are common early indicators of maintenance issues that can develop into something more significant over time.

Every detection is geolocated, and that's what makes it more than a photo dump. Because each condition is pinned to a place in the structure, you can build a longitudinal view of the asset and track how conditions change across successive inspections. That's exactly the information engineers need to make good judgement calls: not every anomaly is a deficiency, and understanding the optimal time to repair for a given client is far easier when you can see the trend rather than just a single snapshot.

The deliverable: a 3D model and supplemental report

The final step is reporting. You can export all annotated images or just a filtered set, add an

introduction, and set a cover image. The report exports to PDF or Word.

Crucially, you can embed a link to the project's 3D web view directly in the report. Stakeholders can open it (no account required) and explore the conditions themselves. They can't change anything, but they can see exactly where a given crack, stain, or spall sits

in the structure. It effectively ends the endless "where is that condition, again?" back-and-forth, because every finding carries its own location and context.

More parking garage inspections coming soon!

This is the first video in a new series on indoor scanning workflows. The garage is large, and we've already spotted spalls on site, so the next instalment will focus on documenting and measuring those spalls in detail.

This isn't technology for its own sake. It's 3D mapping, AI, and vision technology converging to solve a real-world problem: maintaining critical assets efficiently, defensibly, and with a clear record of how they change over time.

Want to see how indoor AI inspection could work for your assets? Reach us at team@hammermissions.com, or book a call with us:

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About Us

Hammer Missions is a software AI firm helping companies in the built environment leverage drones and AI for assessing existing conditions. Having seen 7000+ projects, we're pleased to be working with leading firms in AEC to streamline and scale the process of facade inspections. If you're looking to learn more about how AI can automate and accelerate your building assessment projects, please get in touch with us below. We look forward to hearing from you.