Drones Taking-Off in Construction Industry | Victorville Murphy Contractors

Drones are much in the news these days, and they are finding their way into an increasing number of industries, including the building trades. In fact, the building construction industry is a key area where unmanned aerial vehicles are making some of the biggest inroads.

Drones Working in Construction

The reason drones are finding so much success in construction has a lot to do with the cost of human labor. PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc. forecasts more than $42 billion of human services and labor in the construction industry alone which may become the future terrain of working drones.

The reason for this comes down to efficiency and related cost-savings. Drones are inexpensive compared to human labor, and they have capacities which humans cannot match. Unmanned aerial vehicles are also proving to be faster and more accurate than their human counterparts for certain specific tasks.

Drones are proving to be especially useful in site surveying where they can fly over and map the topography and site boundaries of a construction project with speed and a high degree of accuracy.

Imagery from drones can also be used to produce extremely accurate three-dimensional models of a construction site as it progresses from site development to completion. They can create maps, measure stockpiles of supplies and materials like gravel and lumber, and provide a wide range of other data useful to site managers, workers, and clients.

All this adds up to greater efficiency, more precision, and lower costs in the finished building project.

While drones are making big inroads into the construction industry, this development is still in its earliest stages. So far, hardware development leads the progress in software, and software built especially for drones working in construction has yet to be perfected. So far, drones are better at providing raw data, but they are still not up-to-speed on delivering a meaningful analysis of that data and presenting it in the most useful format for their human bosses.

However, software development companies are working hard to bridge this gap by using the shortfalls of the current generation of drones for improving the software programs and analytics for making drones all they can be on the construction site.

While drones are displacing some areas of human expertise, they are also freeing-up human beings to conduct work which takes a human touch, such as enhancing human communication on the job and evaluating aesthetics.
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