Drones in Construction
Description
While dozens of industries use drones, the fastest growing commercial adopter is the construction industry. Drone use on the job site has skyrocketed in the last year — surging 239% — and construction is now the leading sector using it.
Figure 1: Growth in Industry Adoption (YoY) (Source: https://www.dronedeploy.com/blog/rise-drones-construction-XNpCThIAACcA9X7G/)
Project managers, technology managers, and superintendents are the top roles benefiting from drone data to date. Project managers are leading the change to bring drones to the job site because of the frequent time and cost overruns the construction industry. Tradition project management techniques are complex, time-consuming, and cannot capture project information in detail. Aerial photos, maps, and 3D models have the power to transform the construction workflow. Drones are helping project managers to capture high-quality aerial data that gives streamlined insights to all the stakeholders in real-time. Drones are also very helpful to the Virtual Design & Construction (VDC) managers in visualizing the job site and drone data including high-resolution aerial maps and 3D models can be easily integrated into BIM workflows.
Benefits
In Pre-construction
Design & Topographic Survey
The ability to easily capture and visualize site data using drones is helping designers in evaluating various design options for a given site condition (Higgins, 2017). Topographic maps made from drone data are essential when designing a large-scale construction project and not having this evaluation can lead to costly blunders in design (Zitzman, 2018). Due to their speed, drones greatly reduce the labor and time required in producing accurate topographic surveys. Case study at Brasfield Gorrie general contractors has proven that the use of drones for site survey has resulted in 75% and greater improvement in cost and time.
Earthwork Estimation
Inadequate earthwork estimates is a major reason for reworks in construction projects. In large-scale construction projects, traditional survey methods can take a lot of time to organize, execute, and deliver earthwork data (Kespry, 2018). Drones are helping contractors to accurately measure earthwork quantities and submit a competitive bid. Use of drone is also helping the owners in earthwork quantity verification. Drone software applications compare drone data with the design plan to check the status of earthwork operations.
In Construction
Site Management
Drones can easily capture real-time site conditions for a large-scale construction layout in less time. A comparison of the drone data with the design plans can help construction managers to determine site conflicts and manage these conflicts for better site management. Comparison of onsite drone data with design plans can also help in verifying placement of concrete footings and pipes, determine the optimal location for crane placement, etc. Other than this comparison, drones can help in locating and keeping track of the onsite equipment.
Subcontractor Management
Drone maps can be used to assess the amount of work a subcontractor completed on a given day for real-time quality assurance purposes. This ensures maintaining subcontractor accountability, manage subcontractor payments, preserve subcontractor relationships, and negotiate timely solutions that minimize project downtime (DroneDeploy, 2018). Drones are also capable of tracking onsite construction personnel using video cameras. Post-processing of the collected data by using computer vision technologies, can help in activity recognition and finding the location of onsite construction workers. This ensures that all subcontractor workers are conducting the assigned activities in a given location.
Progress Monitoring
Construction progress monitoring is the most popular application of drones in construction project management. The integration of the point cloud drone data with 4D BIM data for visual simulation of the as-planned construction progress has a lot of potential (Han & Golparvar-Fard, 2017). This method is simpler and more efficient than the traditional methods wherein project managers must walk through the entire site, manually document the progress and update it in the 4D BIM model.
Transportation
Drones with enhanced functions such as GPS mapping and flight planning, geofencing, and larger carrying capacities are changing the dynamics of supply chain management (Dempsey, 2018). Some companies including Amazon and UPS are already using drones to deliver shipments to their customers. Similarly, drones have the potential to improve the supply chain management of the construction industry. Drones, with their ability to fly, can greatly reduce the transportation time when compared to manual methods of transportation.
Safety
The construction industry is one of the most hazardous industries with 21% of the 991 workplace fatalities in the U.S. in 2016. Moreover, the cost of injury in construction is very high. The average cost of injury in construction in the US is almost double the cost of injuries in other industries (Waehrer, et al., 2007). The use of drones in construction is also helping to improve the status of construction safety. Drones can be used to inspect hard-to-reach or accessible-but-dangerous locations. Drones are ideal for investigating dangerous buildings or hazardous sites from a safe location thus eliminating the need for someone to enter an unsafe environment. Not only does it help in reducing safety risks, but also it cuts safety inspection times from hours to minutes. Drones can also be used by safety managers for hazard identification and accident forensics. Creating 3D models and computer simulations also help safety investigators in accident site analysis and generating accident reports (DroneDeploy, 2018). Construction managers can also use drone video cameras to monitor the job site for safety concerns, making sure workers are properly balanced and that no structures and equipment are loose or unstable that could cause injuries to workers (Zitzman, 2018).
Quality
Construction quality can have a huge impact on the cost of ongoing construction processes and can also have a long-lasting impact on total construction costs. Figure 3 illustrates the cost vs quality curve (Kazaz, et al., 2005) in construction projects. According to researches, the cost of having %0 defects in construction is very high.
Figure 3: Cost vs Quality curve
Drones aid construction quality inspection in several ways and accordingly reduce the cost of defects. It captures high-quality images and videos that can be used by quality inspectors to visually check the quality of materials on site. This process of manually checking construction quality depends on the skills of the quality inspector. Therefore, researchers are trying to automate this process by using computer vision technologies. Drones, with built-in measurement tools, can quickly retrieve additional information such as curb heights, sidewalk widths and even the elevation of utility lines so the client can ensure the quality, e.g. to check that the utility lines are hanging high enough for equipment to pass through safely.
Collaboration
Collaboration is an important element for the success of any construction project. There are multiple stakeholders in a construction project and any miscommunication among them can lead to time and cost overruns. Drones can help in simplifying communication and information sharing among stakeholders. Drones can capture annotated maps that can be easily shared among the team members in real-time. These maps can be updated in real-time from the drone-data feed and keep all project stakeholders informed about the progress of a project. This can also enhance the decision-making process by referencing an up to date drone map to any changes made on a project. Drones can also immediately fly to the concerned locations and send live video feed to the meeting participants.
In Post Construction
Maintenance
Drones can be used effectively after a project is constructed. Drones are being used for the maintenance of building structures. Drone data can be used to create as-built drawings and models of the existing structures. This makes it easier for the owner to renovate, manipulate and upgrade aspects of a construction facility. Additionally, drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras can detect heat leaks in a building envelope or along a long run of underground utility piping. Drones can also be used for the maintenance of larger-scale infrastructure facilities such as bridges, towers, roofs, and scaffolding.
Marketing & Sales
Drones can capture video and photographs from a wide range of locations and angles. It can reach places where humans cannot capture incredible visual data. A wide variety of images of buildings can be captured using drones, such as the birds’ eye view, time-lapse, etc. These can be utilized in marketing the construction projects on the company’s website, on social media platforms and other advertising mediums.
Security
The use of drones has the potential to significantly improve security and surveillance. Because of their ability to be present at any place and at any time, drones have become an epitome in security and surveillance. It is used to maintain the safety of employees, protect the job site from theft, and preventing unwarranted entries inside the construction facility. Drones can be used to create around-the-clock real-time monitoring systems. Apart from monitoring, drones are also used for protection and keeping the airspace safe. Security drones are used for protection against bogey drones trying to invade privacy in high-security buildings and infrastructure.
Use Cases
Drones in Construction:
Presentation provided by Alejandro Aguirre with Techint
Related Technologies
Smart Vehicles/Equipment
Robots
Data Analytics
News and References
Álvares, J. S., Costa, D. B. & Melo, R. S., 2018. Exploratory study of using unmanned aerial system imagery for construction site 3D mapping. Construction Innovation, 18(3), pp. 301-320.
Dempsey, J., 2018. Rise of Drone Use in Transportation and Logistics Requires Proper Tools for Reliable, Safe and Efficient Operation. [Online]
Available at: https://na.panasonic.com/us/trends/rise-drone-use-transportation-and-logistics-requires-proper-tools-reliable-safe-and
[Accessed August 2019].
DroneDeploy, 2016. Using Drone Mapping to Verify Construction Earthwork, s.l.: DroneDeploy.
DroneDeploy, 2018. Drones for Construction Project Management. San Francisco: s.n.
DroneDeploy, 2018. Drones: The Holy Grail of Construction Site Safety , s.l.: s.n.
Han, K. K., Degol, J. & Golparvar-Fard, M., 2018. Geometry- and Appearance-Based Reasoning of Construction Progress Monitoring. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 144(2).
Han, K. K. & Golparvar-Fard, M., 2017. Potential of big visual data and building information modeling for construction performance analytics: An exploratory study. Automation in Construction, Volume 73, pp. 184-198.
Higgins, A., 2017. Beginner’s Guide to Using Drones for Construction Management. [Online]
Available at: https://connect.bim360.autodesk.com/drones-for-construction-management
[Accessed August 2019].
Kespry, 2018. Drones for Earthworks Projects: Pre-Construction, s.l.: Kespry.
Kespry, 2018. How to Successfully Manage Earthworks Operations with Kespry, s.l.: Kespry.
Zitzman, L., 2018. Drones in Construction: How They’re Transforming the Industry. [Online]
Available at: https://www.bigrentz.com/blog/drones-construction
[Accessed August 2019].
Provide Feedback
Tell us what you think about this topic! Do you have something to add? More information about how it could be applied? Click the link below to submit feedback. We'd love to hear from you!
Properties