Why Should Construction Firms Prefer UAS?

Construction Tech Review | Friday, December 06, 2019

The aerial images collected via UAS allow stakeholders to conduct detailed inspections at a close range, and this new technology opens new, innovative opportunities in construction.

Fremont, CA: A curtain wall inspection on a multistory building is an arduous task. Workers on the job site spend hours in lifts or suspended scaffolds from clicking photos and taking measurements to document potential problems. It is labor-intensive, time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous. Construction enterprises look for a viable alternative to traditional manual curtain wall inspection methods in the future. Employing Drones could be a safer and cost-effective alternative.

Workers can get fast and accurate photogrammetry when unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are used in building construction applications. These small unpiloted aircrafts can capture high-resolution images for surveying and mapping. They are capable of easy maneuvering and can hover in a place that can be used for complex inspection tasks requiring high-accuracy documentation.

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Scientists have made a comparative study between ground-based laser scanner and UAS. Using the scanner, they captured several million highly accurate measurements of the curtain wall and interior part of the building to develop a baseline for the existing curtain wall. Also, they flew a drone equipped with a digital camera along the same section of the wall to capture georeferenced high-resolution videos and images. The documentation process took less time than that of manual inspection. 

The resulting photos and videos were linked to the building information model (BIM) to provide a record of the current conditions. On selecting a link, inspectors would be able to view an image of the selected section of the curtain wall and can get close-up views of every inch of the exterior skin of the building in the test area. Inspectors can quickly evaluate problems and formulate corrective actions.

Later the UAS captured photos were transformed into point clouds and models using photogrammetric software. The images were compared to the point clouds generated by the terrestrial laser scanner to assess the accuracy of the UAS-captured images. This project demonstrates how construction firms could avoid sending workers up on high-rise swing stages by using an accurate, professional-grade UAS to capture high-resolution images of the curtain wall.

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