How do drones impact construction workflows? What kind of data can we get from them, and how much difference do they bring to the table? Last year, Commercial UAV News hosted a webinar to understand how construction stakeholders have defined this value to quantify the ROI of a drone program in five specific areas: cost, time, safety, workflow, and communication. In this webinar, CUAV was joined by Greg James from DroneUP, Cory Knittel from Skydio, Amr Raafat from Windover Construction, and Douglas Spotted Eagle from Kuker-Ranken.
Talking about that very first moment when you assess what kind of drone you might need for a job and what projects would be a good fit, how do you help people figure that out?
Douglas Spotted Eagle: The first question is, "What is your deliverable?" The drone is effectively meaningless; it's just a flying scanner. What kind of scan data do you need? Do you need lidar data? Do you need photogrammetry data? Those are the two primary questions since that one decision alone will determine the airframe you're going to be working with. For example, if you're looking to get involved in lidar, lidar pucks are reasonably heavy, automatically qualifying the purchaser for something that will be a little larger airframe. It might be a DJI Matrice 300 with an L1 on it if you're at an entry-level, planning on flying very low, and the environment doesn't have a lot of obstacles. Then you can step it up to larger airframes that start putting you into the price ranges of $50,000 to $60,000. If you need to be able to shoot through vegetation, you're going to end up with, again, a different type of air platform because of the payload you'll be carrying. However, suppose your organization is only looking at doing photogrammetry. In that case, whether it's going to be stitched together and put in place as a point cloud or you're looking for pretty marketing 3D models, you can get away with a very small drone.
But before you choose the aircraft, you also have to decide what your delivering platform/software will be. For example, unlike photogrammetry, lidar requires some proprietary software for most manufacturers to deliver what we call an initial point cloud. You can choose anything you want, from free to super expensive for photogrammetry. We want to look at the deliverables first, not the aircraft. Understanding what those deliverable pieces will look like will help us begin to specify what the aircraft parameters should be and what we're going to do with that particular aircraft.
Continue reading: https://www.commercialuavnews.com/construction/the-top-5-ways-construction-companies-measure-roi-with-their-drone-program
Talking about that very first moment when you assess what kind of drone you might need for a job and what projects would be a good fit, how do you help people figure that out?
Douglas Spotted Eagle: The first question is, "What is your deliverable?" The drone is effectively meaningless; it's just a flying scanner. What kind of scan data do you need? Do you need lidar data? Do you need photogrammetry data? Those are the two primary questions since that one decision alone will determine the airframe you're going to be working with. For example, if you're looking to get involved in lidar, lidar pucks are reasonably heavy, automatically qualifying the purchaser for something that will be a little larger airframe. It might be a DJI Matrice 300 with an L1 on it if you're at an entry-level, planning on flying very low, and the environment doesn't have a lot of obstacles. Then you can step it up to larger airframes that start putting you into the price ranges of $50,000 to $60,000. If you need to be able to shoot through vegetation, you're going to end up with, again, a different type of air platform because of the payload you'll be carrying. However, suppose your organization is only looking at doing photogrammetry. In that case, whether it's going to be stitched together and put in place as a point cloud or you're looking for pretty marketing 3D models, you can get away with a very small drone.
But before you choose the aircraft, you also have to decide what your delivering platform/software will be. For example, unlike photogrammetry, lidar requires some proprietary software for most manufacturers to deliver what we call an initial point cloud. You can choose anything you want, from free to super expensive for photogrammetry. We want to look at the deliverables first, not the aircraft. Understanding what those deliverable pieces will look like will help us begin to specify what the aircraft parameters should be and what we're going to do with that particular aircraft.
Continue reading: https://www.commercialuavnews.com/construction/the-top-5-ways-construction-companies-measure-roi-with-their-drone-program
