Drones know the dirt: How UAVs can measure jobsite materials | Dump Trucks Charlotte NC

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Erik Gronneberg is a reality capture manager for North Reading, Massachusetts-based Columbia Construction. Opinions are the author’s own.

As a reality capture manager, I regularly use drones and drone software to quickly and accurately calculate the volume and weight of any stockpiled soil or material stored on a jobsite.  This relatively new approach has provided big benefits to project costs and timelines. 

Previously, we would rely on our site subcontractor regarding the quantity of a material that needed to be excavated, stored or moved. 

They would come out to the jobsite and survey a given stockpile with a base station and rover. They’d collect a handful of data points by physically walking around the pile and estimate the volume of material.

In contrast, a properly trained and equipped drone operator can fly over any material stockpile, generate a point cloud with millions of data points and have actionable data to the project team within a few hours.

Of course, flying a construction drone isn’t as simple as hitting the order button on Amazon. The process to gather this type of data requires three elements: 

• The right drone.
• Flight planning and data processing software. 
• A properly trained and licensed drone pilot.

The right drone

The drone that I fly, a DJI Mavic 3, costs approximately $6,000 and is equipped with an Real-Time Kinematic system that helps with geolocation, which I recommend. There are many other good options in the marketplace, but one thing to consider is that if you do any columbus oh dump truck company for the federal government or federal contracts, they will require you to fly a drone system that is made in the United States. For this reason, it’s worth noting that DJI, the leading drone manufacturer globally, is based in China.

The right software

There are many good drone software options to choose from, including a few good free options. Most are available via tiered subscription models that start at a few hundred dollars per year. I use DroneDeploy.

It offers flight planning, data processing, and analysis in one package and costs approximately $10,000 per year. It is a well-known software that is used by many commercial drone pilots and allows you to program flight plans so that the drone can capture the desired information on autopilot. 

During a flight over a construction site, the unmanned aerial vehicle will typically take anywhere between a from a few hundred to 1,000 images, depending on the size of the site. When these images are uploaded they generate an easily accessible point cloud from all the images taken during the flight. This point cloud can be used to measure anything on your jobsite. 

You can also create cut-and-fill reports by comparing existing conditions captured by the drone to the design surface. This allows you to track how much material needs to be removed or added. 

With most drone software options that are geared toward the construction sector, you do not need to be a CAD wizard, and can view the 3D model directly in the software. Regardless of the software that you choose, understanding how to interpret and deliver the data is critical to the success of your drone program.

Pilots

Regarding pilots, you have two options: hire a commercially licensed drone operator to fly on your jobsite or train a member of your own staff.

To hire a commercial drone pilot with the expertise to do stockpile evaluations, expect to pay somewhere between $120 to $250 per hour depending on the region and scope of work. For a stockpile flight mission I would budget between eight and 16 hours total. 

This number can vary significantly depending on scope. That would generally cover transport, flight time, data processing and reporting. Even though the pilot may only be on site for a few hours at most, they have a lot of other expenses and time that go into providing the data.