This document discusses the potential uses of drones in the construction industry. It provides an overview of the history of drones, from early military applications to current uses. Drones could be used for site surveying, security, safety functions like delivering first aid kits, asset tracking, and communications. Benefits include low-cost surveying without initial ground access. Current issues include developing regulations and flight times, but political lobbying and new technologies may help address these issues. The future prospects drones building structures themselves through robotics are also discussed.

1. Drones in Construction
Julian Snape

2. Technovation Anglia
Droning On
A brief overview of
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – a.k.a. Drones
And their potential application in the
Construction Industry

3. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Julian Snape (Cert Ed) background
• Initially rained in fields of Cartography and Remote Sensing
• Severn Trent Water Authority flood mapping – ground survey
• Motor Gliders and Microlights – low cost air survey
• Photography and pioneered near Infra Red
• Apple Computers – Eastern Region from Cambridge
• IT Manager Games and Publishing Industries
• Futurologist – London Futurists 4,000 + members
• Transpolitica – Cross-Party Think Tank and Lobby Organisation
• Technovation Anglia – Disruptive Technology research and
integration network
• Pilot, light aircraft and gliders

4. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
First we shot at them
De Havilland Queen Bee Drone with Winston Churchill
It has been said that it was from the Queen Bee the word Drone came into common usage for UAVs

5. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Then they shot at us!

6. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
WW1: 1917 Inventor Archibald Low and the remote
controlled Ruston Proctor anti-Zeppelin Drone
Interwar: Navy and RAF Fairey IIIF and De Havilland
Queen Bee Drones
WW2: Father of Drones, Reginald Denny a well known
ex Actor, ex RFC observer, pilot and R/C aircraft
enthusiast migrated to USA
Reginald Denny opened a R/C model hobby shop in
Hollywood. In 1935 he demonstrated a prototype
target drone, the RP-1, to the US Army. He then
founded the Radioplane factory and manufactured
fifteen thousand drones for the army during WWII
At the Radioplane factory in 1944 an Army publicity
photographer David Conover saw technician Norma
Jeane and thought she could become a model. She
did, after changing her name to Marilyn Monroe.
David Conover’s CO was Capt. Ronald Reagan, future
President of the USA
The RAF test flying a land based Queen Bee Drone

7. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Battlefield Drones
MQ-9 Reaper
By 15 January 2014, RAF Reapers had
flown 54,000 flight hours in Afghanistan
and dropped 459 guided weapons (now
Iraq and Syria)
Black Hornet Reconnaissance Nano Drone
for use by individual soldiers to scout the
battlefield
As of 25 October 2013, the British Army
had 324 Hornet Nanos in service

8. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Now they might do something constructive
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) expenditures over the next 10 years are expected to total $91
billion, according to the Teal Group
• Surveillance
• Mapping 2D and 3D
• Delivery (DHL & Amazon)
• Farming
• Communications
• Asset tracking
• Archaeology
• Life-saving
• Policing –Taser-drones.

9. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Drone configurations pros and cons
• Fixed wing – Stable, longer airborne, but no hover
• Land – Walking and rolling, limited access
• Water – Swimming and floating, single environment
• Swarm – Co-operative – in development
• Manned! – Strictly speaking not a Drone but using
many of the technologies
• Multicopters – Stable, hover, low Airborne time

10. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Sensor types – light weight
• High quality gimbal
mounted stills cameras
• HD Video both streamed
and recorded
• Near Infra Red
• Far Infra Red - Thermal
• LiDAR – High accuracy,
through vegetation
• Other sensors, CO2, CO
sniffers etc

11. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Stages of potential use
in construction
• Pre-planning
• Job Site detailed survey
and mapping
• Construction process
monitoring
• Post build checks
• Sales and marketing

12. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Multiple roles in construction
• Fast and low cost site survey and mapping
• Security – intrusion detection
• Safety – Lighting, medical
• Asset tracking - RFID
• Communications – WiFi extension
• Delivery – small items quickly

13. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Site survey and mapping
Survey
• Choice of sensors depending on accuracy
requirement
• Optical HD and GPS co-ordinate geo-tag mapping.
Can get x,y,z accuracy down to 3cm
• LiDAR for stable, higher cm accuracy from up to
1,000’ and through vegetation to bare earth
Mapping Software
• Converts gps co-ordinates into 2D and 3D maps
• Plot and drafts quality images with software such
as Pix4D, Agisoft PhotoScan and Virtual Surveyor

14. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Security
Dynamic intrusion detection
• Automated patrol with HD video
• Airborne CCTV real time and/or HD
image capture
• Infra Red at night
• Deployment of intense light
Abnormally detection
• Regular flight intervals map identified
and sensitive areas to identify any
movement between over flights.
Monitor structural movements,
subsidence or even equipment lean.

15. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Safety and medical
Medikit
• Rapid dispatch of First Aid medical packs
to areas of a site that may be distant
from the First Aid point either
horizontally or vertically.
CPR
• Lightweight defibrillator kits are now
available with remote assistance
capability to fly out to any more
seriously injured employees

16. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Asset tracking
• In 2014 Age Steel, a United Arab
Emirates (UAE) company used an
RFID reader mounted on a small
Drone and passive ultrahigh-
frequency (UHF) RFID tags to
track steel products, such as
pipes and plates stored on-site
Source: http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?12209/3

17. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Communications
• It may be possible to mount
communication systems on Drones,
such as Wifi extenders, to increase
Wifi range and short term
accessibility in complex sites
Delivery
• In a publicity stunt cans of CocaCola
were delivered to construction
workers in Singapore

18. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Identified Technologies
Pittsburg USA based
company pioneering
automated Job Site Survey
‘Boomerang’ Drones
• Automated flight path
• Automated battery swap
• Data sent to Cloud for
Analytics
• 100 Acre site mapped in
10 minutes

19. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Sky Futures of Hayes, Middlesex
Oil Rig Inspection
• Offshore and Onshore
• Dual Control
• Pilot
• Camera operator
• HD, Video and Thermal

20. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Benefits of Drones in construction
• Low cost relative to ground survey teams
• Can reach exposed, difficult and dangerous locations
• No longer necessary to have initial ground access to
proposed site
• Rapid deployment and completion of mapping
• High quality imagery across spectrum with various
sensor types

21. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Current issues
• Legislative environment in flux
CAA (UK) and FAA (USA)
March 2015 House of Lords Report
“Civilian Use of Drones in the EU”
• Time airborne
• Control – remote or automated?

22. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
Solutions
• Political lobbying for balanced legislation
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Systems Association
• Geo-locking for no fly zones (airports and other
sensitive areas)
• Fuel cells for time in the air
• Standards need to be developed

23. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
The Future
Drones actually
Building...?
Created as an installation for
the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France
in early 2012
Models a speculative construction
system that integrating
robotics, digital fabrication,
engineering, and design. Small
quadcopters lift 1,500 foam blocks
into a complex cylindrical tower
standing more than six meters high.

24. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
“Be part of the process to develop and propose
standards before they are enforced by others,
Which may increase the cost and complexity of
useful operations or curtail them completely”
Julian M. Snape
Technovation Anglia – Future proofing Your
Business

25. Technovation Anglia – Droning on
See us about the
COMIT & Fiatech Drone Project Eye in the Sky
2015/2016
Drone R&D and Assessment Project
Technovation Anglia and The Hub Group