By Owen Ryan, Staff Writer
As the construction industry slowly continues to adopt newer and more advanced technologies, the possibilities are endless in terms of cost savings, project management, and team communication. Throughout the years, construction jobs sites have, for the most part, continued to use traditional approaches and technologies to get the jobs done.
Although many new technologies have already been adopted and applied to various integral parts of a job. There is tremendous room for potential growth in the industry involving 3D modeling, machine control, and advanced computer learning algorithms. Specifically, this article will aim to explore and explain the advances and potential applications of newer technologies that can aid in the engineering and management of construction job sites.
One massive breakthrough in the civil engineering and surveying aspect of construction is the application of drones to employ the power of photogrammetry, lidar, and infrared sensors. Often overlooked as a recreational hobby, drone technologies, and their capabilities to take advantage of a wide variety of different payloads that each present a great opportunity to produce massive value and insight.
The first, and typically most commonly used method for generating a 3d model is photogrammetry. Put simply, photogrammetry is the process of taking individual pictures and stitching them together to create extremely accurate models of any structure, job site, or stockpile.
In order to do so, the pictures used for this process must be overlapped and stripped down to raw point clouds. Once the point clouds have been created, the software can be used to find common points from these individual pictures and tie them together creating an extremely accurate model.
The biggest advantage of using photogrammetry is mostly involved with the cost and ease of use. There are many software companies such as Propeller, Pix4d, and DroneDeploy who readily provide these software services. However, photogrammetry is an extremely processing-intensive workflow and can often take over many hours to fully process and view the data compiled.
Another option that also provides a plethora of capabilities is LiDAR. Although LiDAR data of the existing topographic conditions can be readily extracted from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and used for site design and planning purposes. Much of its benefits can be applied throughout a construction job.
While producing a similar data set as photogrammetric surveys, LiDAR has many advantages. The first is its ability to penetrate the canopies of trees and low-lying grasses and shrubs. This can be extremely beneficial, as the elevations pulled from a photogrammetric survey may slightly be skewed from the low-lying shrubs and trees spread across the site. Another large advantage to LiDAR is the short and drastically shorter processing time. However, the large upfront cost of the sensor and the higher grade drone necessary for use is a factor that leads most to settle with photogrammetry.
