Construction projects are bedeviled by many factors that drive up costs, impact worker safety and effect project deadlines. Falling behind by a couple of weeks due to equipment downtime, inspection bureaucracies or safety issues are common, all impact a project’s bottom line.
Drones are making a dramatic impact in this space, by decreasing the need for lengthy visual inspections, reducing logistics time, and identifying problems by spotting anomalies early on.
Let’s focus on crane inspections as an example – an essential safety task mandated by OSHA on a monthly basis. The impact of inspecting cranes is crane downtime which directly translates into underutilized resources and loss of operating income. The current method used to perform a comprehensive crane inspection, requires the crane to cease work, be retracted and moved to a designated inspection area outside of the worksite. This process alone is complex, disrupts the work of multiple people for many hours and endangers site workers’ safety. A skilled safety inspector then needs to visit the site and inspect each crane for safety hazards such as deformation, cracks, corroded or worn parts, loose bolts or rivets, fraying of cables and more, before validating the crane’s compliance according to the standards.
Drones are a cool new tool that construction companies are using to gain better actionable insights and make better informed decisions in their daily operations. The data that drones capture is not enough though. Software that enables the consistent and accurate acquisition of data autonomously, generates digital twins, creates 2D and 3D models, provides annotation, tagging and collaboration capabilities, enables enterprises to make better decisions based on accurate field data and analytics. This is what vHive is dedicated to.
Going back to our crane example, using autonomous drones, every crane is fully surveyed from every angle and position while it is erected in the site. Data is stored, documented, and then annotated and tagged by a remote inspector, generating detailed inspection reports. The documented survey data enables comparison over time and evaluation of fault dynamics. The enterprise can efficiently share information, shortening the decision-making process and minimizing downtime, all powered by vHive’s software solution.
Having better control on the job-site, minimizing safety risk to employees and reacting to developments much faster are just some of the immediate benefits that drone automation brings.