Construction Tech Talk: Drones in Construction

A Very Useful Tool in the Toolbox

Aside from being used for Super Bowl halftime shows or captivating my young niece and nephew, drones have a variety of incredibly interesting and useful applications in the construction industry. For a comparatively small investment, a construction company who employs or contracts with an FAA Part 107 licensed drone operator can perform regular inspections of site work, provide progress updates beginning with a site survey and continue through the construction process, and be utilized to provide highly detailed, fully interactive 3D models. Drone inspections, progress updates, and 3D modeling of construction sites are just three of the use cases for drones on a construction site.

Let’s Take a Closer Look at Inspections

One of the best use cases for drones in construction is for inspections. Drone inspections can gather accurate data quickly, safely, and inexpensively. Inspecting a bridge in a traditional manner, for example, is often difficult, time-consuming, dangerous, and expensive. It might require an inspection crew to spend time planning and coordinating. A crew member might need to dangerously rappel down or crane into position using costly equipment that might take days to position. Even then, the crew member might only be able to inspect what could be a small fraction of a very large bridge. It could end up being a very tedious, dangerous, and costly process.

Utilizing a drone, an inspector can collect the visual data in mere minutes with minimal risk to the inspection crew that, in turn, ensures a bridge is safe for the general public…and that, after all, is the ultimate goal. It can get close to a damaged area to take imagery of it to relay to a repair crew, so they’re familiar with the problem in great detail before they’re even dispatched to the site.

Drones can also provide high precision measurements for inspections. For a simple example, they can accurately measure distances from one corner of a building to another. A technician can export the geotagged (contains GPS information) photography from a drone flight into a 3D model application in order to tag certain locations that could be problematic later in the project’s lifespan. This will allow a repair crew to take care of that water pooling on the roof before it becomes a serious issue. They can perform inspections from a variety of altitudes, headings, and camera angles, including directly above a project for a top-down view. An angle like that is fantastic for flat roof or civil infrastructure inspections.

A day of planning and on-site assessment and a day of flying can produce a 3D model that inspectors can view high resolution imagery and inspect concrete for cracks or other weaknesses from the comfort of an office located elsewhere.

Hey Jobsite, Can I See How It’s Going?

Another use case for drones is for providing progress reports. A traditional on-foot assessment can be time-consuming, unreliable, unclear, and potentially incomplete. A drone operator can provide status updates to interested parties. For example, if a decision maker wants a weekly update, the drone operator could save a flight log that will contain exact GPS coordinates, flight path and speed, camera angles, and other settings. The pilot would fly with the exact same flight parameters while taking the same imagery as the previous flight(s). The images could then be overlayed onto a previous flight’s imagery and used to catalog the project progress with times and dates. The updates could be monthly, weekly, or even daily, depending on the speed and specific requirements of the project.

Using a drone for progress inspections can exponentially speed up the process of surveying a construction site. It can be organized into an easy-to-analyze report affording managers near real-time updates that reduce the lag time between when something changes on site and when they find out about it. They’re very useful for providing documentation for every stage of a project.

Some drone software can estimate quantities of objects such as a mound of earth, measure temperatures, or elevation changes. This would be useful information when performing initial sitework to estimate how much earth needs to be moved or where a water runoff would inevitably lead. Knowing that information could be extremely valuable to reroute water runoff to save peoples’ homes or businesses during a flood.

You Don’t Need 3D Goggles to See These 3D Models

One of the most visually striking use cases for drones is the ability to create fully interactive 3D models. These models can be imported into CAD software using point-clouds from higher end drones. Some drones utilize LIDAR (Laser Imagine Detection and Ranging) technology that bounce a laser off a surface that get instantly (well, at the speed of light) returned to the drone to measure distance to an object. They can also overlay imagery to create a 3D model that an interested party can explore.

Many 3D mapping software packages offer terrain-following algorithms that will fly autonomously at a constant altitude above ground to create an even and consistent dataset. They are also capable of creating user-defined corridor flight plans that are useful for mapping and inspecting roads, pipelines, or powerlines…things that are (generally) thin enough to map or inspect using one pass.

Embrace the Emerging Technology

Inspections, progress reports, and 3D modeling are just the tip of the iceberg for use cases for drones in the construction industry. Some of their other uses are planning and design, equipment tracking and asset inventory, remote monitoring, security and surveillance, and personnel safety, to name a few.

Some people fear drones or are otherwise hesitant to embrace a changing technology. There are countless videos on YouTube of a curious party interrupting a pilot as he or she is trying to avoid obstacles and fly safely (this is one of the reasons why I always suggest flying with a friend or coworker present—another set of eyes is always a good thing). But as drone reliability, stability, and safety grows, they’ll likely end up doing much more for the industry. If an AI chat program can write a doctoral dissertation, could an AI-controlled drone build something completely by itself? …maybe that’s my next blog topic!

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