Using a UAS (an unmanned aerial system, or drone) for 3D mapping provides many benefits to a project. A UAS can capture aerial images and LiDAR from the sky. This equipment can be used to perform photogrammetry, topographic surveys and more. Here, we explain the benefits of utilizing UAS technology.
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Benefits:
The aerial images or LiDAR data collected by a drone can be used to create topographic maps, 3D models and an overall aerial image of the project. A drone can collect many different types of information that are beneficial to a surveyor, client and project:
Drone surveying provides many benefits, including more detailed and complete data collected on on a job site. Kaw Valley Engineering staff and management are conscientious of the advancements being made in surveying technology, which is why we are excited to offer UAS services along with our growing list of advanced surveying technology to get your project done quickly and accurately. For more information about our survey services, please click here.
Since , Kaw Valley Engineering has been the team of experts needed to help take a project from inception to completion, providing a full range of civil engineering, geotechnical engineering, surveying, construction observation and materials testing services throughout the Midwest. Our firm has offices in Junction City, Lenexa, Salina, Emporia, and Wichita, Kansas; and Kansas City, Missouri.
Being able to capture precise and accurate visual representations of a worksite quickly and efficiently is a major benefit of using drones for surveying. But there are other advantages as well.
Take the guesswork out of pre-bids and progress tracking
Bills of quantities in construction allow for quick and easy comparison of contractor proposals. Since all bidders are quoting the same amount of work, it&#;s easy to identify differences in price. Bills of quantities are also used to clearly define the scope of work on a project. Since quantities and amounts are provided, there&#;s no room for misinterpretation and less chance of mathematical errors. Using a drone to survey materials on a prospective jobsite helps ensure that the contractor pricing you submit is accurate, and you&#;ll be compensated for the work you complete. Comparing your initial site survey to the original ground file provided allows you to request a change-order upfront to secure more money for the project if you spot an unfavorable variance between the two.
Case Study: Located in Bloomsdale, Missouri, R&K Excavation is a heavy civil contractor offering excavation and grading, utilities and site work, drilling and blasting, and civil services. To ensure projects are profitable, R&K uses drone surveying to meticulously track progress and costs compared to the original bid. One current project is a four-mile stretch of road that covers 550 acres and they fly it multiple times a week with a DJI Phantom 4 RTK drone. They fly sections of the site weekly on Thursday and Friday and have processed data back by Monday. Read Full Case Study.
&#;You don&#;t need to have a degree in grade control or 15 years of surveying experience to be able to turn out a product that looks like you are a professional surveyor. Drone surveying allows us to gather data and do our calculations and get our run time, without having to tie up our grade control guys.&#;
Patrick S., assistant project manager for grade and quality control, R&K Excavation
Avoid rework
According to the Construction Industry Institute, rework is estimated to represent 2%-20% of total costs. It impacts project timelines, costs, schedules, machine resources, and person hours. All of which erode profitability. A major cause for rework is a lack of information or using outdated information in decision making. Technology, like the Propeller Platform, makes solving this problem easier with more accurate and timely data. Drone surveying enables site supervisors and superintendents to receive up-to-date maps with accurate specs approximately one day after requesting them, which contributes to better decision making and ultimately less rework.
Case Study: Haskell provides engineering, design, and building solutions for industrial, commercial, government, and civil infrastructure sectors. They use a variety of subcontractors to help with their projects. Managing the quality and progress of individual subcontractors&#; work, and verifying it meets design specifications, is critical to staying on schedule and avoiding conflicts. Base-and-rover surveying wasn&#;t feasible here due to speed of construction and the whole site needed to be surveyed once or twice a week. By using drone-captured data and Propeller, Haskell could visualize twice-weekly surveys and track contractors&#; progress quickly and easily. Read Full Case Study.
&#;Propeller makes it easy for us to monitor the work happening on the worksite and make sure everything is being done as designed and modeled. The level of visibility drone surveys provide allows us to identify issues quickly and before they become expensive problems.&#;
Hamzah S., technology and innovation manager, Haskell
Improve site-to-office communications
Survey data captured by drones and processed by software platforms like Propeller help centralize project documentation and increase collaboration with surveyors, engineers, foremen, and site managers. Collaboration challenges span the entire life of any project and it&#;s important that all stakeholders at each stage have the data they need to understand if a project is on track, on budget, and on schedule. Platforms like Propeller centralize all your information in one place including present and past surveys, designs and iterations, and all your notes, reports and files.
Case Study: RIPA & Associates is a civil and utility construction services company located in Central Florida and consistently ranked in the Top 100 Private Companies in the Tampa Bay area. They focus on commercial, residential, industrial, and public sector construction projects of all sizes. Don Campbell manages RIPA&#;s purchasing, IT and field technology departments while also managing projects. A few years ago, Don noticed that drone technology was coming to the forefront as an alternative to aerial photography. While new to drones, he learned more about drone surveying and now shares project details with estimators, field superintendents, and inspectors and has fully embraced drones as a way to get more accurate information about their projects to key stakeholders on a more real-time basis. Read Full Case Study.
&#;We now have a whole spectrum of users from superintendents to lead foremen to less tech-savvy users. Our project managers have become power users and use it on a regular basis to track flight-by-flight comparisons for monitoring production. Our time can be better spent looking at the drone footage and then coordinating with our team members who need to act on it.&#;
Don C., senior manager, RIPA & Associates
Minimize change orders
According to the Independent Project Analysis Group, an average of 35% of all construction projects will incur a major change. One study indicated that change orders led to project cost overruns of 11-15% on average and delayed projects as much as 20% beyond scheduled completion dates.
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The photogrammetric data you get from surveying your site with a drone enables you to execute work with greater accuracy, making change orders less likely. But when the need for change orders does arise, accurate drone data about your site makes it easier to renegotiate potentially problematic changes. When you&#;re never more than a day or two away from your latest survey data, you can execute more effectively and make better decisions at every project stage to ensure you&#;re paid accurately. Visual data, such as orthophotos (overhead photos of your site) can make change orders easier, because it&#;s difficult to argue with a photo! Check out 3 Tips or Manage Change Orders to learn more.
Case Study: D.H. Griffin Infrastructure provides site grading and development, specialty concrete, and underground utility services in and around North Carolina, USA. Keith Taylor manages their GPS machine control equipment, site positioning, manual survey instrumentation&#;and drone surveying, which he does by using the Propeller PPK workflow. Keith shared how having more accurate data has given his company a competitive advantage when the need for a change order arises. Watch Case Study video interview and read the summary.
&#;We had a project where there was a discrepancy between what our drone was seeing in the existing topo versus what was in the survey that was done for the design. We were able to use that information to negotiate additional work.&#;
Keith T., GPS Control, D.H. Griffin
Avoid disputes
A study found that 87% of more than 500 respondents from architecture, engineering, and construction firms had dealt with disputes in the past 12 months, a substantial increase from 63% in . In their annual Global Construction Disputes Report (), Arcadis found that the leading cause of disputes in North America was poor record keeping and documentation.
Resolving disputes requires a clear communication and documentation plan. Drone surveys conducted at the start of a project and at regular intervals throughout the course of the work provide a historical record and a consistent (and reliable) record of progress over time. Should a dispute arise, contractors can revisit the relevant site survey to address any concerns.
Accurate records established with drone data also enable contractors to quickly identify and address project errors or concerns and provide clear, accurate, unbiased, and easy-to-understand documentation of every stage in the project.
Case Study: Based in Olso, Norway, NCC is a leader in North European construction. NCC works on everything from property development to infrastructure, including a subsidiary dedicated to civil framework projects like new highway and railway builds. When NCC started on a nine-kilometer railway project that included four large bridges and moving a million cubic meters of earth, they looked for an efficient way to share site data between surveyors, survey managers, foremen, site managers, and the customer. Having a proven timeline of data has made it difficult, if not impossible, for disputes to arise. NCC has seen a huge reduction in disputes across the company. Read Full Case Study.
&#;The reason why there hasn&#;t been a dispute is because we have these site photos. There was no discussion because there was nothing to discuss. You can&#;t say it didn&#;t happen when we have photos every 14 days and can see what happened in between.&#;
Mats N., Planning Manager, NCC
Save time and money
Measuring quantities and progress manually takes time, resources, and often a full-time dedicated person. And in remote areas, a large chunk of time is spent just accessing a site. When survey data can be captured and processed in hours, not days or weeks, projects go smoother with less rework, added expense, and overhead. Using cloud-based processing also eliminates the need for server and computer costs and is much more scalable.
Case Study: Rickabaugh Construction focuses on large-scale projects across Oregon with humble origins 20 years ago in the owner&#;s barn. Travess Graham started as a field foreman and quickly felt drawn to the GPS side of the business and was excited about the impact that using drones for surveying could have on his business. It wasn&#;t unusual for Travess to drive hundreds of miles each day between worksites to help calculate stockpile volumes and confirm elevations. Once, Travess was working with a subcontractor who challenged whether compaction testing had taken place and asked Travess to tear out weeks worth of already-laid asphalt. Rickabaugh was able to show the contractor flight data and photos that confirmed compaction testing had taken place and saved the company $100,000 in one day. Read Full Case Study.
&#;It&#;s cutting edge. It gives you an advantage over everybody else and sets you apart. I&#;ve even had city engineers tell me &#;I wish I had a drone.&#;
Travess G., GPS manager, Rickabaugh
Site balancing
One of the major costs in earthworks is importing or exporting dirt from the site. A way to save money for this operation is determining if the project can be done by only using the dirt that&#;s currently on site, known as site balancing. When developing a grade design for a civil construction or earthworks project, a key goal is to ensure the dirt on the job site balances as much as possible. This means that the cuts and fills are relatively equal, so that contractors don&#;t have to import or export dirt in trucks to finish a job, which can be costly. Moving the existing earth around on site with excavation machinery is more cost effective. When you survey your worksite with a drone, the data you obtain allows you to track your dirt quantities more accurately and balance your site.
Case Study: Located in eastern Ohio, family-owned Sheckler Excavating provides a wide variety of services including earth-moving, utility work, reclamation, cement stabilization, and site work to customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New Jersey. Sheckler does everything possible to balance their sites with the existing material on-site to minimize the amount of import or export material required. Using Propeller allows them to understand each month how much more dirt they need to move around the landfill cell. Read Full Case Study.
&#;We&#;re now building our fourth landfill cell. We fly it every month, compare the surveys and report the data back to our customers. They ask to see our topos when they&#;re planning new cells, and Propeller has really helped with our yardages. We can accurately measure the stockpiles and inform our customers how much dirt is in each one.&#;
Nicole S., project manager and head of surveying
Reduce safety risks
Flying a drone enables surveyors to stay on stable ground while safely navigating dangerous terrains and slopes or avoid close contact with busy highways. Drone surveying keeps crews onsite for less time than traditional survey methods, reducing the risk for an injury to occur. Mapping a site becomes as simple as programming a flight path and piloting the drone, and it yields just as accurate results.
Case Study: Zak Dirt was founded in and focuses on highway and heavy construction projects. They recently started construction on the Boulder Canyon project, a 14-mile long road cutting through mountainous and hazardous Colorado terrain. Getting quick and accurate topos was challenging, and sometimes impossible. They now use drones to frequently and safely capture survey data and obtain their reports within 24 hours. Read Full Case Study.
&#;Boulder Canyon&#;s terrain is simply too difficult to survey by hand. It would be too dangerous, taking shots up and down a slope. There&#;s absolutely no way that would be done. By the time we did a topo of the canyon and got it back, we would be two months past when we needed it.&#;
Angelo M., corporate treasurer and head of GPS surveying
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