The #1 Industry to Be Impacted By Aerial Data: Construction
According to Goldman Sachs 2016 state of the industry report, construction will be the largest sector financially impacted by commercial drones, with an estimated earned value of over $11b between now and 2020. Aerial data captured via drone can provide accurate and detailed information throughout the construction process, allowing companies to better manage their time and resources on job sites.
The return on investment is straightforward. Drones are less expensive than manned aircraft, execute projects faster than human surveyors, and are capable of collect data faster than either. This allows contractors to monitor a job-site’s progress with a higher degree of accuracy than ever before. With the right tools, construction companies can turn aerial data such as photos and video, 3D structural models, topographical maps, and volumetric measurements into useful information for tracking site progress or quantifying stockpiles of resources like sand and gravel. This data allows construction companies to more efficiently manage resources around a jobsite, minimize potential issues, trim costs, and limit costly delays.
The construction industry, and the drone industry are both at a major inflection point, with significant overlap. Here, I weigh in on the factors that have led us to this point, and what this means going forward for both industries. Specifically, what has happened in the drone industry to democratize the benefits of the technology to bring such benefit to construction? Why now?
The Power Is In Consumer Hands
The average off-the-shelf consumer drone, as sold by DJI, Yuneec and others, is a modern marvel of technology. For a product that costs between $500 and $1500, the amount of technology included is staggering: multiple linux computers, premium chipsets, autopilots, 4k cameras, GPS, accelerometers and more, all in a package on the shelf at your local Best Buy.
There are millions of these products in consumers’ hands worldwide, and tens of thousands in the hands of legal commercial service providers and companies. The availability of this technology, at this price, will set the wheels of change in motion across industries.
An important technological aspect of consumer drones that is often overlooked is the integration of advanced autonomy. These aren’t simply remote controller helicopters being flown by flight expert. With technologies like the popular ground control station for mobile Autoflight Logic (200k autonomous flights by over 30k users), ground control stations allow for the pre-planning of autonomous flights that can be duplicated, templated, and shared amongst teams in advance and in the field. Execution no longer requires manual skill.
With this level of autonomous planning comes vast possibilities in the world of cloud processing. Knowing precisely how data is captured allows for cloud transforms to process, analyze and distribute this data.
The Birth of the Drone Software Ecosystem
Drone hardware has been a competitive landscape for years, with many companies thriving and others collapsing completely in the competition to own consumers and commercial users hearts and minds. The next trend in drones is software ecosystems enabled by the dominance of drone platforms with millions of hardware pieces in consumers hands. The drones are the iPhone, what will be the killer apps that run on them?
There are many companies working to answer these questions. The most common battle being fought is in the 2d and 3d processing of drone-captured data to create maps and models. Further opportunities lie in logistics platforms, processing platforms, integrators, logging and analyzation. All of the above are opportunities for companies to build digital infrastructure for potential commercial gain.
The Death of the Specialized System
Many companies have spent significant time and money on complex, high-end, closed or semi-closed hardware and software systems that specialize in certain industries (aggregates, construction, oil and gas, agriculture). While these companies often have success with customers in a niche, their share will not increase exponentially. New consumer drone systems pack nearly as much (and ironically, sometimes more) technology at 1–10% of the cost of specialized hardware. In addition, the enabling software for consumer systems has more users, more testing, and greater application. “Consumer” hardware platforms running specialized software will be the long term solution for the majority of business needs, not specialized hardware systems.
Introducing: Consistent Autonomy
The execution of software to pre-plan and do complex maneuvers remotely with drones has long been an obsession with hobbyist drone communities, leading to the birth of long-term open source projects like Tower, a powerful Android-only ground control station for drones running the Pixhawk autopilot and its derivatives.
New autonomous software enables the tools for drones to be used autonomously in industry at scale. Not only can complex flights be planned beforehand to execute for more robust data acquisition that a human controller ever could, but these flights are now repeatable, movable to be replicated over different areas, and shareable between users and aircraft.
Yet another significant benefit of autonomous flight planning and sharing can be found in the post-processing of the acquired data. repeatable and sharable means processing of the same data can be standardized, and moved to cloud-based processing solutions, removing manual processes to edit or stitch.
In addition, repeatable, autonomous data acquisition creates huge databases for the application of machine learning, in particular being able to recognize if equipment is deployed on-site, the changes in volume or distance of materials, and even predictive analytics based on past trends.
All of the data drones are acquiring in construction, at decreasing, commoditized prices, will radically change the way accounting, project management, and pre-visualization is done across infrastructure worldwide. The algorithms created at the same time will usher in radical savings across industry.
In my next article, I’ll be discussing the potential application of deep learning technology and drones to several types of accounting practices. I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction!
