On the second day of the DroneDeploy conference in Denver, an enterprise panel discussed what automation means on the jobsite – capturing data with automated drones, ground robots, and more.
This yr’s DroneDeploy conference has been exciting – not only is the corporate announcing a slew of recent features, they’ve honed in on the worth that drones – each aerial and ground based – can provide for enterprise customers. For the drone industry, it’s a welcome progression from “it’s not the drone, it’s the info” to the overall understanding that the info needs to supply practical and concrete use that makes life easier, no more complicated, for professionals.
On the ground, the talk amongst attendees shouldn’t be nearly data, it’s about reality capture – the excellence being that reality capture is about using multiple technologies to record a physical space in digital form. Once you’ve captured an area in digital form, you possibly can share it with distant personnel; apply AI-powered algorithms to extract useful information; track changes over time; and use it to reply specific questions. At this morning’s keynote, Tyler Hollen, the Director of Construction Technology at Wadman Corporation and Christopher McKee, Reality Capture Manager at Turner Construction, talked with technology providers from DroneDeploy, DJI and Boston Dynamics about how they’re using automated drones (each aerial, with DJI’s drone dock; and ground-based, with Boston Dynamics’ Spot) for reality capture.
Hollen points out that reality capture has passed through phases: from a primary stage of walking around with a digital camera and uploading those files, to a second stage of using digital automation to place that data into context and extract information, to the present stage of physical automation, where a robot collects the info and pushes it robotically into the system.
“In case you have a look at events like the economic revolution, there are specific technologies that must all come together at the identical time to make it occur,” said Hollen. “In our industry, you would like the robotics to be at the suitable stage of development to do that.” With the discharge of the DJI Phantom 1 in 2013, the discharge of Boston Dynamics’ Spot – able to walking up and down stairs and over obstacles – and the 2022 launch of the DJI dock, the robotic pieces for automation are in place.
“You furthermore mght need the software,” said Hollen. “You might have to define the work that you simply want the robot to perform. That’s DroneDeploy – we consult with the dock, we consult with the robot, and we get what is required. But there’s more to be done.”
Hollen’s company moved to automated reality capture with the DJI drone dock in response to a rise within the variety of drone flights the corporate was performing. The corporate does pre-proposal flights of potential sites to collect all of the info that they’ll to present to the interview team. That data also rolls over to the project planning phase.
After that, the team previously did monthly in-depth reality capture of the development site while in process, in addition to “at request” flights, which could happen before and after major earthwork, or before landscaping covers up piping. With automated flights, they’ll easily perform more flights, more often.
“We went to the DJI dock because we had a serious uptick within the requested flights,” said Hollen. “Now we have had owners who saw a lot value in the info that they kept asking for more. Dock enables us to offer more value and deliver a greater project.”
For Chris McKee, reality capture before automated robots meant using unicorn sensors on helmets to you walk through a site. For his or her company, using Spot for normal reality capture has meant less of a burden on staff and higher quality data.
McKee says that implementation of automated robotics has been a crawl, walk, run strategy. “After we bought Spot, we needed to test it: can it walk over rebar? Can it walk through water? That was our crawling stage.”
“Then we needed to determine tips on how to walk: tips on how to get the info that we wanted.” Their company needed each photos and scans: mounting a 360 degree camera onto Spot met their needs.
Automation software was the important thing to bringing their robotic reality capture program to the following level. “After we connected Spot with DroneDeploy, we weren’t just walking – it was a full sprint,” said McKee. “We went from determining what we desired to do to doing autonomous missions inside a few days. Now we’re testing the boundaries of what’s possible.”
Hollen also points out how easy to make use of each the Dock and DroneDeploy’s unified platform were to implement. “We were amazed at how easy it was – we got the dock, got it arrange, and had [the drone] within the air inside a few hours. On install day, I got it in place, arrange, flew all of my missions for that day, and was home in time for my kid’s soccer game.”
On the software side, combining ground and aerial data with automation makes the entire work of reality capture on construction sites easier. “We’re capturing ground data with humans without delay, and having [the data] all put together is great. But the actual thing is the benefit of use – automation takes the entire driving, the transfer of information cards, the time – it takes all of that out of the equation.”
DroneDeploy announced a monthly lease program for Spot, packaged with the DroneDeploy software. “We’re very excited to launch this – we actually need to unlock this capabiltiy for our customers,” said DroneDeploy’s Head of Ground Robotics David Inggs.
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