Engineering with Drones

Several upper Midwest firms highlight trends with drones, including more companies developing their own pilots

By Andrew Weeks

Using drones for business purposes may not be a new trend, but what is trending is that more engineering and construction companies are licensing their own pilots.

Apex Engineering Group, for example, started using drones about three years ago. Drones there were first used mostly to record pictures and video for marketing purposes, providing images for press releases and other promotional material. But the company’s focus on using drones has changed over time, according to civil engineer Brent Muscha, just as it has for many engineering and construction companies.

Apex, which has offices in three locations in North Dakota and one in Minnesota, has found drone use an applicable and efficient tool to survey projects and track progress. What’s more, the drones it flies are piloted by its own in-house staff.

“It’s developed in the last few years as we’ve gotten a little more savvy with what we’re doing,” said Muscha, who is based in Fargo, N.D. He said Apex does not hire specifically for pilot positions but instead surveyors and engineers who, on top of their primary duties, would like to take on the additional responsibility of piloting drones when the need arises.

That need arises more frequently these days.

Apex started with two pilots – Muscha and a colleague – but it now has five licensed pilots. And while the company still uses drones to capture images for marketing purposes, there’s great client appeal using them to track project successes.

“We’ve gotten into the habit of using drones more in construction projects. It actually has become somewhat of a routine,” he said.

Capturing images from a drone’s-eye view of the different phases of a project, which the company sends to clients, is something clients seem to like. That’s especially so during the coronavirus pandemic, when it may be difficult for people to go onsite to see a project or if they’re uncomfortable doing so.

It helps “give them an overview of how things are progressing without actually having to be on site,” he said. “I think it gives them a little better feeling about what actually is being done. It’s kind of hard, when you’re on the ground, to see some of the things that are happening (with a project). You don’t get quite the same feeling of scale as you do when you see it from a drone photo from a couple hundred feet high.

“When you’ve got a street project or something like that and all of a sudden, over a period of a month or so, you’ve got four blocks in the street completely reconstructed, you just get a better idea of the scale of the work that’s been done. I think that’s what they appreciate.”

The Many Uses of Drones

Construction planning, management and inspection are among the leading uses of drones commercially, according to Dan Edmonson, founder of Drone Genuity, based in Hopkinton, Mass. He works with companies throughout the United States, including contract work in South Dakota. He said that year-over-year adoption of aerial data and analysis suggests that construction leads all other industries at 238% growth.

In this sector, drones are used for surveying, digital mapping and topography, soil analysis, inspections and the monitoring of projects. And just as relevant, drones are good for security monitoring, documenting and sharing progress with stakeholders, and providing unique experiences when social distancing won’t allow in person visits – some of the ways in which Apex uses them.

“Our pilots can and do perform all of these functions on a weekly basis,” Edmonson said. “One of our most popular requests is for construction progress photos. We are seeing more and more requests for thermal imaging for energy conservation, 3D renderings and finished project marketing videos. As more companies use drones to reduce on-site staff and become more comfortable with the technology, we continue to see more interest and more unique projects.”

Dave Bowen, technology innovation manager with Ulteig, said the company over the years increased its drone use with projects. For example, drones are helpful in surveying the right-of-way for transmission lines before a structure can be built.

“In this case, that actually requires the use of LiDAR (light detection and ranging) on a drone because of the need to punch through vegetation, which may lie within that right-of-way, to get a precise topographical model that we can pass to the engineers who do the actual designing of the transmission line,” he said. “So that’s one example. Another example is using the same type of approach for surveying but instead of using LiDAR we’d use photogrammetry. This could be done, let’s say, for one of our transportation clients. … There’s a ton of applications on the surveying and mapping side.”

Bowen said he believes drones are being better utilized by firms and that “there’s a ton of interesting applications, whether that’s a visual and thermographic survey substation or you’re doing a thermographic analysis of a solar farm to check for instances of potential damage to PV panels or what have you; or if you’re doing wind turbine inspections.” continued on page 19

Bowen is based in Colorado but said Ulteig, an engineering consulting company, has several offices in the region. Drones mostly are used with its surveying team, he said, noting the unmanned craft will continue to play a role in Ulteig’s future.