Six ways drones in construction add value

The use of drones in construction is now commonplace. In fact, the impact is now so large that companies will fall behind industry standards without them. So it literally pays to know about how construction drones impact workflows at all stages of a building cycle. This—along with an understanding of how different construction drones work for different applications—will help you decide what the best drones for your construction projects are. First, let’s look at the six ways they will help you run your construction site:

1. Significantly safer sites

Drones capture 3D views of worksites with centimeter-level resolution and accuracy. So you can say goodbye to climbing poles, being suspended by ropes and surveying stockpiles on foot around active machinery. Gone too are the site shutdowns and unspeakable impacts of construction site incidents related to surveys or inspections.

Did you know that between six and nine percent of construction project costs are injury related? This leads to increased insurance prices and reduced profit margins. A deadly accident can end a construction company all together.

Instead, a construction UAV allows a surveyor to gather life-like looks at every detail of your site from a distance—simply plan a flight, gather the data and process it for planning, inspection and infrastructure maintenance purposes. Drone data outputs also enable security views of perimeters. Breaches can be identified and addressed much faster.

ROI insight: The average cost of lost project time due to just one injury on a construction project is USD 35K, and this does not include litigation, medical bills and compensation. Considering this, a reliable, highly-automated drone platform removes surveyors from active sites and easily pays for itself.

The true cost of construction incidents

2. Massive savings on survey-grade site surveys

Before construction drones, topographical, planning, and inspection insights were often based on disjointed information that took days to gather, analyze and share. Since sites progress fast, this information was always slightly outdated.

It’s now possible to gather precise, photorealistic details across an entire active site area in a matter of hours, with just one or two drone pilots leading the collection.

This means that at every stage of your project, fast, comprehensive and accurate views and analytics are available, on demand, to all site managers, contractors and stakeholders, within hours not days.

Plus, if you are conducting frequent drone construction surveys, their outputs are on record to answer questions or assess details with a click of a mouse rather than the time of a worker to drive out and check.

If a construction company is still using traditional survey crew, they’ll spend about $150 an hour for several days. That's a lot of money. Or they can go out and buy this drone, and it’s going to pay for itself very quickly. As busy as we are, I think the drone probably paid for itself within the first month of us buying it. It was just worth it to buy.

Alex Lowry
Certified Drone Operator, Brent Scarbrough and Co.

ROI insight: Drone surveys cut the costs of survey crews dramatically. They also offer fast turnaround on deliverables, which offer clear views and records on which to base important decisions that move projects forward faster and keep it on time.

Save time section comparing a leading survey construction drone with traditional survey methods

Traditional survey

6.5
h

WingtraOne

1
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85% faster survey means that a one-hour surveying job with the WingtraOne VTOL construction drone equals up to five hours with traditional survey methods.

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3. Real-time tracking (via updated, accurate construction drone data)

Miscalculations are only natural when hundreds of decisions are made on a construction site every day. Drone data gathered at regular intervals allows project managers to check all areas of a site not only for progress, but also for the exact alignment of as-planned to as-built.

Many times, the earlier any error is caught in the process, the less costly it is to rectify, and the less delay it costs the entire project. Regularly updated views of activity across a site allows tracking and saves countless hours and expensive delays.

Missing and stolen equipment is also a reality on busy construction sites. In fact, in the most recent annual equipment theft report by Verisk, stolen equipment costs the construction industry USD 1 billion per year. Up-to-date site views with centimeter-level resolution also help monitor security fences and the location of equipment on a regular basis.

ROI insight: Mistakes are expensive, the cost of a good drone platform to prevent the bulk of them, and catch others early, is cheaper. Equipment tracking is also much easier with an updated, granular view of the entire worksite.

What kinds of drones are used in construction?

Depending on the type of construction site, two types of drones prove essential: multirotors and fixed-wings. Multirotor drones offer remote inspection of small areas and vertical assets because they can hover. But they are limited for coverage. Fixed-wing UAVs offer complete, accurate, true-to-life views of entire sites because they can capture a lot of ground in just one flight. VTOL fixed-wings, in particular, offer this wide coverage plus the vertical take-off and landing capabilities of multirotors, so they are quickly becoming an industry standard.

VTOL drones are versatile fixed-wing, large coverage drones used on complexes, solar farms, road projects and more.

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4. Faster decisions and overall project times

Key stakeholders are often not situated onsight, and in some cases they’re not even in the same town. Up-to-date drone construction site data is available on the cloud and instantly to whoever has permission to view and manage it. This saves time and traveling costs when contractors, managers and owners need information.

Instant and updated site views enable checks and validation so that stakeholders get a precise view of as-built and as-planned, make decisions and approve next steps. When they can do this from anywhere, at any time, it speeds up overall project times.

ROI insight: Imagine saving days and the cost of airline tickets to fly stakeholders to a project site, when the site could be viewed on a tablet or screen. That’s just one of the ways construction drones pay for themselves.

5. Expedited contract reconciliation

When it comes to agreeing on sizes of stockpiles and amounts of earth moved in a certain period, it’s much easier to do with more exact measurements. This is what drones offer. Thanks to high-resolution payloads and photogrammetry software, millions of data points cover each stockpile and surface, offering much more precise volume and progress analytics.

Imagine daily views, and you start to get an idea of how this prevents long discussions at the reconciliation phase. Owners, contractors and subcontractors are all starting to rely on drone data to compare site activities. Those who don’t, have less to bring to the table. Those who do, simply pull up the files, flip through the days, display measurements and prove or disprove the claims.

ROI insight: On busy construction sites with tight deadlines, the last thing you want to spend time on is on disputed claims of work done and earth moved. With regular frequent drone data snapshots of the worksite, everything is on record, accurate and available at the click of a point on the screen.

This successive display of drone flights gives insight into how powerful daily records of topographical surveys are in terms of recording progress, offering accurate analytics and reconciling any discussions about what and how much was moved, when.

6. Lower overhead maintenance

Collapsing bridges, buildings and other infrastructure has sadly dotted news headlines, followed by reports of damages that must be paid by site owners. The cost of avoiding maintenance checks and infrastructure updates is overwhelming compared to the price of doing it. And drones cut the later price down to a fraction of what it was before. They lower that investment barrier and enable governments and asset owners to conduct thorough preventative maintenance.

ROI insight: Maintenance checks and work can be so expensive that site owners try to avoid them. But in the long run, it’s impossible to estimate the destructive cost of incidents and the loss of life due to failed or outdated infrastructure. Powerful drone platforms lower the investment required to perform more effective maintenance.

Why ease-of-use matters in a construction drone

Construction sites don’t exist in vacuums—they operate on deadlines, are subject to weather and are themselves rugged environments. It’s important that the drone solution you choose is not only rugged enough to handle such environments, but also easy enough to operate so that you can reap the benefits of on-demand data.

For example, if you have a belly-landing drone, the setup will be difficult since you need large, soft areas for it to land. So vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) is the best option for construction drones. Beyond this, you need to know you can conduct a quick survey of a large area in a tight weather or time window to get the latest look at operations.

Finally, training drone construction survey pilots and keeping them confident requires a system that is both intuitive and reliable. Here are some key things to look for:

Use of drones in construction—in detail

Drone data is so versatile, it can be used throughout the entire construction lifecycle, from feasibility and tendering to delivery and maintenance.

1. Bidding and pre-planning

Before the launch of many construction projects, a topographic survey, or “topo” of the site is required to get a good understanding of the environment in which the project will take place. DTMs and DSMs of a site generated with drone data can show possible drainage points, changes in elevation and other factors that can assist in selecting the best locations for building, digging or storing materials.

A real case of avoiding planning errors with construction drone data

Before the survey began, BFW’s client already had ideas about where all of their panels and equipment would be placed during and after construction of the solar project. But from the digital terrain models based on the WingtraOne survey data, Cash was able to offer them more insight than they expected. This likely cut countless costs in time and money.

The client saw from the elevation maps where the solar farm would most definitely flood, so they rearranged their construction plans around the areas that would stay dry all year round.

They saw the visual representation and realized ‘that’s where the elevation drops off, and we’re not going to be able to put anything down in there.’ So we really gave them a good glimpse of the why and why not.

Jacob Cash
BFW Mobile Mapping and LiDAR Department Manager

Site survey in the Alps - 3D model — Surveying during the pre-planning phase may also involve conducting surveys in hard-to-reach areas or areas without any road access at all. In the middle of the Alps, at a high altitude of 2500 m (8200 feet) above sea level, 20 wind turbines are to be built. The site lacked road access, nor were there any pre-existing detailed data for the planning of the wind farm site. The 800-hectare (1908-acres) mountainous site was surveyed by a WingtraOne drone and resulted in orthophotos, a DSM and a 3D model with an accuracy of 3 to 4 cm (1.2 to 1.6 inches). And all of this was done in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

Site survey in the Alps - orthomosaic — Surveying during the pre-planning phase may also involve conducting surveys in hard-to-reach areas or areas without any road access at all. In the middle of the Alps, at a high altitude of 2500 m (8200 feet) above sea level, 20 wind turbines are to be built. The site lacked road access, nor were there any pre-existing detailed data for the planning of the wind farm site. The 800-hectare (1908-acres) mountainous site was surveyed by a WingtraOne drone and resulted in orthophotos, a DSM and a 3D model with an accuracy of 3 to 4 cm (1.2 to 1.6 inches). And all of this was done in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

Site survey in the Alps - DSM map — Surveying during the pre-planning phase may also involve conducting surveys in hard-to-reach areas or areas without any road access at all. In the middle of the Alps, at a high altitude of 2500 m (8200 feet) above sea level, 20 wind turbines are to be built. The site lacked road access, nor were there any pre-existing detailed data for the planning of the wind farm site. The 800-hectare (1908-acres) mountainous site was surveyed by a WingtraOne drone and resulted in orthophotos, a DSM and a 3D model with an accuracy of 3 to 4 cm (1.2 to 1.6 inches). And all of this was done in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

2. Planning and design

Pre-planning images collected by drones can then be used as part of the planning process, providing the digital-twin foundation that the work of others—such as architects, local authorities and engineers—can be merged with to analyze ideas for their real results.

Digital twins of entire city centers are now possible in one flight

For example, you can overlay 3D models and buildings onto drone orthophotos of current infrastructure to get a clear sense of how a new building might look next to an existing one. Then you can explore particular details, like where shadows are casted and what kinds of outlooks/views will be available or obstructed.

In short, construction drone data enables you to see how new projects will impact the area from both a practical and an aesthetic viewpoint. You can also extract precise data such as curbs or manhole measurements and import them into your CAD or GIS software to enrich existing data.

Urban planning with zoning — Zoning map overlayed on an aerial map of a mixed urban and leisure area.

Urban planing with zoning and new buildings — Aerial map with construction zones, as well as existing and projected buildings

Urban planning with buildings — Aerial map with existing and projected buildings

Urban planning with 3d buildings — Aerial map with projected buildings in 3D on top

Projected buildings with surface allotments

Because a whole construction project is based on geospatial data, it has to be accurate. This is also an area where drone data shines. We can take topographical [topo] survey work by certified drone pilot Alex Lowry at Brent Scarbrough as an example. Lowry has been a surveyor since before drones, so when he runs topos, he knows the kinds of numbers he needs, and he is ready to prove accuracy with engineers and stakeholders.

I'm flying two or three times a day or every other day. I'll compare what I shoot in the field to the drone point cloud from WingtraOne GEN II [VTOL drone]. There are plenty of times I see shots that are 4/1000 [0.01 cm] of a difference or less. This is incredible accuracy.

Alex Lowry
Certified Drone Operator, Brent Scarbrough and Co.

Topographical survey in Fairburn, GA, by Lowry. Click here, for a detailed, zoomable experience with this output.

“The accuracy has been fantastic. I tell people all the time, I’m 99.9 percent confident that the topos I’m sending the engineers are about as accurate as you can get shooting it manually with a survey crew,” said Alex Lowry.

3. Execution

While it already offers multiple advantages in the planning phase, the greatest value of drone use might come when projects enter the construction phase.

Earthworks, volumes and contract reconciliation

From drone images, you can generate a point cloud consisting of thousands of points, each containing geospatial (X, Y, Z) and color information. Then, with photogrammetry software, you can get precise volume measurements and run a cut/fill analysis.

This daily cut-fill view based on WingtraOne drone-captured data saves money and time in several ways, including basic procurement of the output and minimizing discrepancy between measured and real-life earthworks.

Contractors who move earth are paid according to the amount they have moved. So good accuracy when measuring the amount of earth moved is necessary. Highly accurate drone data reduces the margin of error in these calculations, and the payments.

For example, the Norwegian Road Administration hires contractors to build roads, and their chief engineer Gry C.S. Kjellsmoen said: “The drones help us to follow up with the contractors who build the road. We can agree on estimates, how the work will be carried out and the amount to be paid. We have everything they have done in detail, including the amount of debris that has been moved.”

More frequent controlling of as-built vs. as-design

One of the most striking advantages of frequent, accurate site visualization is the ability to overlay the CAD on the orthophoto. This allows you to compare, on-demand, what was actually built with the plan and make sure that they fit together. Site managers can then identify differences between planned and real-time progress and steer projects accordingly.

Building in construction with overlayed blueprin — Drone images of a building under construction with overlaid plans. Credit: Pix4D

Road construction orthomosaic — Road construction site with overlaid plans

Monitor site progress down to the fine details

During the construction phase, site managers have to control and validate completed work in order to permit continued work. The faster you are able to check and validate a task, the faster you can move on to the next task, saving time along the overall construction process.

Given the relatively low cost of using a drone to collect visual data on a construction site, it’s possible to carry out surveys on a regular basis and build up a record of progress.

This timeline of information can be used to control and validate tasks more quickly, saving time and ensuring that deadlines are met.

Road construction progress — Monitoring the progress of road construction in Norway.

Faster communications, decisions and hazard identification

On construction projects, there are often several stakeholders in several locations who are all eager to know how things are progressing.

For this to be possible, stakeholders should visit the site, or hire a prohibitively expensive helicopter to collect aerial photos. And even if they did this, the pictures collected could be out of date by the next business day.

The visual data from regular drone surveys assists in on-demand (could be daily, weekly) operational planning. It furthermore helps in explaining how immediate work should be performed and helps identify safe or hazardous areas.

Visual reports can also be sent to customers, helping them to stay informed about how things are progressing in terms of time and budget.

Minimize rework and claims via tight documentation

When your project is moving forward, and it reaches a milestone, you want to be sure that everything has been achieved to the highest quality standard. Further construction is based on these milestones.

So if something has been done wrong, you’ll eventually get stuck, and you may have to tear down what has been done previously. Having up-to-date visual data can help you catch a mistake before it takes shape and avoids demolition and the waste of time and materials related to it.

And when mistakes are built over, you have regular documentation of the process, and you can check back to see where the mistake occurred more precisely and settle disputes without lengthy discussion, or even court cases.

Provide a comprehensive handover to the site owner

Detailed documentation presents advantages to both the contractors and the site owner, who will take over responsibility of the project once complete.

Specifically, the owner can look carefully through the documentation before agreeing to the handover, and contractors can prove that the work has been conducted as per requirements, including details on who did what.

4. Maintenance and asset inspection

Maintenance is usually deprioritized because it costs time and money and doesn’t bring much instant value to operations … at least not when they are running as usual. But as soon as you are faced with a serious problem due to lack of it, you can be held responsible and lose a lot of money.

That said, ensuring quality maintenance of assets is not always easy to do at a reasonable cost. By sending drones in the air, companies can visually inspect large assets or those located in hard-to-reach areas more quickly and cost-effectively.

The Alabama Department of Transportation spends most of its time on maintenance of roadways. They are using an oblique camera configuration to survey large stretches of road, fast, without flying over traffic. This 3D construction drone survey data helps them evaluate the condition of the roadways as well as erosion prevention infrastructure.

Dam inspection with aerial images — Dams like this one in Valencia, Spain, are large structures requiring time-consuming inspections and specialized safety equipment and protocols for physical access. Images from aerial drone surveys can be used rather than manpower for these often dangerous inspections or for the examination of inaccessible features.

Road safety with 3D images from drone — This 3D model of a mountain road and its slopes above it in the Swiss Alps allow engineers to inspect rocks that could threaten the safety of the road. If any rocks look unstable, they will inspect them on-site. By comparing surveys each year, the engineers will be able to identify and study any changes that might indicate a rock fall that would take action to prevent it.

Drone imagery outputs

A survey firm mapped a 283 ha (700 ac) real estate project in Chile with WingtraOne and its RX1R II payload to obtain data with ground sample distance of 2.4 cm (1.0 in). The following outputs provide examples of how this data is used along the construction project life cycle.

1. Orthophotos and orthomosaics

Drone images are corrected for image distortion and stitched together during post-processing to create a highly-accurate orthomosaic map. Each pixel contains 2D geo-information (X, Y) and can directly procure accurate measurements, such as horizontal distances and surfaces. They can be overlaid on projected designs and on blueprints to track site progress, serving as a visual communication tool and site documentation.

2. Point clouds

A densified point cloud can be generated from drone images. Each point contains geospatial (X, Y, Z) and color information. It provides a very accurate model for distance (slant and horizontal), area and volume measurements.

3. Digital surface models (DSMs) and digital terrain model (DTMs)

In DSM and DTM models, each pixel contains 2D information (X, Y) and the altitude (Z value) of the highest point for that position. These models can be used, for example, to determine which part of the site could be flooded should water build up or if you need to hire a contractor to flatten the earth.

4. 3D models

The 3D textured mesh is a reproduction of the edges, faces, vertices and texture of the area shot by the drone. This model is most useful for visual inspection or for when external stakeholder input or public involvement is essential for a project.

5. Raw images

As they have not been processed, raw images offer an even greater level of detail and can be very useful for asset inspection and site analysis.

Why is WingtraOne a great fit for construction and infrastructure projects?

To get the most benefits from an in-house construction drone survey team, it’s essential to choose the right models for the job. This often involves choosing a fixed-wing aircraft—offering a longer flight time and therefore a wide coverage—and a rotary aircraft (multi-copter drones), offering the convenience of quick and controlled vertical asset management..

The WingtraOne VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) drone is the most easy-to-use, high-efficiency fixed-wing system on the market. With its intuitive and safety-checked autonomous workflow and well-integrated, high-quality GNSS sensors and positioning systems, pilots can capture areas of various sizes at survey-grade accuracy in a fraction of the time terrestrial surveys used to take. The VTOL design and glass fiber airframe of this system means it’s automatically more reliable than a belly-landing traditional fixed-wing. In fact, it fits right in with your equipment, fetching high-accuracy data, on demand, in rugged, dusty environments.

It covers large areas, fast

Many construction sites tend to use multicopters, because the initial investment is low. Also their ability to fly around a building or around infrastructure, such as a bridge, makes them excellent tools for small-scale inspection.

While multirotors are cost effective and great to have on hand for small areas and vertical assets, their low coverage makes them too expensive—in terms of time and money— for topographical surveying and larger project sites.

Just think about a highway, a railway track, a water retention basin or drone mapping large infrastructure like solar farms or an airport. It will take multiple flights and multiple days to survey the whole area with a multirotor. And it will take even longer to get higher accuracy since the cameras in multirotors are lower resolution so they need to be flown lower.

This stretch of road (7 km, 4.3 miles) was captured in a single flight with the WingtraOne drone using its corridor mapping feature.

Comparatively, in one flight, WingtraOne covers up to 11x more than multicopter drones, all while providing higher accuracy than multirotors. It’s also the fixed-wing option of choice, since traditional belly-landing fixed-wings cannot carry heavier sensors, so they need to fly lower to get the same accuracy. That said, WingtraOne can map around 2x more than a conventional fixed-wing drone.

Maximum coverage with one flight
at 1.9 cm/px (0.75 in/px) GSD

WingtraOne
RGB61

Other fixed-wing drones

Multicopter
drones

With the quadcopter, we started to get overwhelmed with how much we were going to have to fly … it would be nonstop. WingtraOne turned that planning around, and Sean could strategically see what areas he was going to fly on which days and in what order. It was no longer feeling like we were never going to finish.

Alex Ramirez
Senior Manager, Business Technology at PCL

Even for smaller sites that a normal multirotor can cover, WingtraOne can prove necessary. Think about surveying in bad weather conditions that only offer small windows of clear skies. As soon as the conditions are good, you need to cover your site as quickly as possible. Having a drone that can get the data many times faster is critical in these cases.

It features vertical take-off and landing (VTOL)

Another advantage of WingtraOne for large areas is the vertical take-off and landing. “We looked at fixed-wing drones, but they need a passage to land, and we often have small places for landing. We can take off and land everywhere with WingtraOne. It’s really good,” explained Kjellsmoen, from the Norwegian Roads Administration.

WingtraOne offers fully-automated flight, it takes off from and lands in a predictable and tight space without requiring the operator to risk entering the construction site itself.

In this video we see the WingtraOne VTOL drone taking off and landing vertically like a helicopter and tilting to forward flight mode to fly like a fixed-wing aircraft.

WingtraOne’s vertical take-off and landing enables it to carry heavier payloads packing twice the resolution of hand-launched classical fixed-wings. Also, unlike drones that land on their belly, WingtraOne’s cameras never come into contact with the ground. This protects the high-quality sensors from abrasion, dust and dirt common to rough terrain found on construction sites.

It captures high accuracy and resolution data

Because an entire construction project will be based on geo-spatial data, it needs to be accurate. Equipped with the 42 MP full-frame Sony RX1R II camera and a multi-frequency PPK GNSS receiver, the WingtraOne delivers best-in-class GSDdown to 0.7 cm/px (0.3 in)/px GSD and absolute horizontal accuracy,

WingtraOne can map a 130 ha (320 ac) quarry in an hour’s flight. The resolution of the final map allows you to zoom in and see a coin lying on the ground. And what is best is that it’s possible to know the exact coordinates of the coin down to an absolute accuracy of 1 cm (0.4 in).

It’s super easy to use

WingtraOne flights are fully automated, requiring no piloting skills and little training. The flight planning is done via WingtraPilot, an intuitive app with various ways to prepare and modify flight plans, as well as monitor and revise missions during flight.

This 7-minute video shows how to plan a flight, how to collect aerial images and how to safely interact with the WingtraOne drone at any time. Watch how orthomosaic maps, point clouds and digital elevation models are produced from the collected images.

The Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) considers road construction update projects their “bread and butter.” They survey more than 100 km (62 mi) of highway in just a few days with WingtraOne, and they’re impressed by its accurate data, robust performance and its ease of use.

We're going to the site knowing we will get the job done and done right. That's a big advantage, just the ease of use. If somebody with no experience can go out and get started and trained on the WingtraOne GEN II, I think they would really see the advantage it brings to their program.

J.D. D’Arville
UAS Program Administrator at ALDOT

PS: It’s even easy to use in cases of strict regulations

As a government organization, ALDOT is extra aware of regulations and is aligned completely with them. One of these regulations involves very limited flying over people. Highways are full of people and can’t be blocked just for surveys. So Wingtra’s Oblique Sony a6100 proves a huge boon for mapping highways without flying directly over the traffic. Since the payload captures at an angle, accurate and clear highway data can be gathered by flying in parallel. Beyond this, the oblique payload is engineered to capture 3D data efficiently, without the need for double flying cross-pattern plans.

Did you know?

WingtraOne GEN II is on the Blue UAS Cleared List due to its points of production, parts sourcing, reliability, high performance and security features.

With this clearance, government agencies in the US enjoy Department of Defense pre-approval to gather data over areas that otherwise require applications for exception to policy.

It has a smooth corridor-mapping feature

The corridor mapping feature enables fast, efficient coverage of long, narrow stretches. It proves especially useful for the following types of aerial mapping projects: roads and railway track construction and monitoring, pipeline and power line inspection, river mapping, etc.

Fly through a road of 22 km (13.7 mile) road by Hades Geodeesia. The generated point cloud contains 1.2 billion points, with a GSD of 1.2 cm/px (0.4 in/px) allowing for precise measurements. It took nine hours with a WingtraOne drone to collect the data in the field.

“Our pilot in the field has a WingtraOne, a Phantom, Sirius and a Falcon, and if I told him ‘please go and get some measurements,’ every time he picks Wingtra.

Mapping the same road two years ago, we used another drone, covering 3 km (1.8 mi) of road per day. Right now, in that same time, we cover the whole road, 22 km (14 mil), with WingtraOne.

Vaiko Veeleid
CEO of Hades Geodeesia

Wingtra data works with all post-processing software

WingtraOne’s images are standard and software-agnostic. This means you can process them with all major photogrammetry software out there. Further integrations, such as the one with Trimble Business Center, makes getting highly-accurate geospatial data to CAD or GIS software more seamless.

What is the best construction drone?

While it’s clear that different drones work best for different applications, construction sites usually demand several things from a drone:

Back in the day, we would go fly a large area with a Phantom 4 or a Mavic 2 Pro. It takes forever, with the quads. When we purchased the WingtraOne, it really opened us up to doing large projects. And we have done some very large ones for imagery and 3D reality meshes.

J.D. D’Arville
UAS Program Administrator at ALDOT

See how these features stack up among the leading brands.

Read drone comparison

Drones in construction FAQ

How are drones used in construction?

Construction sites incorporate several contractors and the dynamic coordination of activities from start to finish. Drones collect true-to-life imagery and with photogrammetry software these images are stitched together to make maps that contain accurate geographical location information. With these maps, stakeholders can measure anything on the site, track activities across a span of time that has been mapped repeatedly. This allows for faster settlement of contracts and quick decision making, which speeds up the entire project.

What are drones used for in construction?

Drones can be used to map bare earth before a construction project has begun so that the feasibility of it can be analyzed in detail. They can also be used to map existing infrastructure so that planned infrastructure can be superimposed, availing a range of analytics and fine-tuning options. During construction, real to planned imagery helps ensure the project is on track. And after the project is finished, drones can capture detailed and accurate maps that help in the management and maintenance of the infrastructure.

How are drones changing the construction industry?

Drones are speeding up the survey process significantly and making it much more cost effective. This frees the surveyors time for QA and also helps keep sites on track and operating according to deadlines. Construction drones are also lowering the barrier to more regular surveillance of infrastructure for more frequent maintenance checks and effective management over time. In short, they are making construction projects more efficient as well as significantly more safe since they reduce the need for people walking around active zones.

What are the regulations around flying construction drones on sensitive sites?

Regulations are clear according to location. They are updated regularly and generally apply to the height ceiling of drone operations and more sensitive or populated areas. This article is a good start to understanding the way regulations work and how they apply in special cases.

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