Drone survey advantages & disadvantages

[00:00:02] What are the main advantages and disadvantages of drone surveying compared to traditional surveying methods?

[00:00:09] Yeah, absolutely. So in this instance, I'm going to speak primarily about land surveying. It's the most relevant, I think, for drone surveying.

[00:00:20] The big difference, let's start with the negatives. There's nothing going to replace the accuracy of a traditional surveyor on the ground. There's nothing going to replace that. Maybe in a few years when drones get very, very good, but right now, traditional surveying methods on the ground using total stations or laser scanners or things like that, that's unassailable in terms of its accuracy. But in terms of efficiency, bang for buck, if you will, the drone is very hard to beat, especially in large areas of land.

[00:00:55] There's very little can beat a drone in terms of its ability to capture data quickly, efficiently, and in dangerous areas. So for example, we did a lot of coastal site mapping in a project recently. And almost all of that was not accessible at all unless you were hanging off of a rope. It was cliffs or very sheer pieces of land that could not be accessed. But with the drone, we were able to just fly out, point the drone at this land and map it all entirely, no problem at all.

[00:01:28] When you have something like that at your disposal, an object that you can place anywhere you like in 3D space and orientate your sensors on whatever piece of land you want, it makes it incredibly versatile. The speed of capture as well and the density of data that you can get from a drone is far in excess of what you would get with, let's say, traditional methods. So I can easily capture 3 to 400 hectares in a day. Whereas to do the same thing with a tight grid pattern with traditional surveying methods is, let's say it takes a lot longer.

[00:02:09] You're not putting people at risk as well, in dangerous land or working exposed alone out in places. So that sort of thing is probably some of the benefits. There's some scenarios where a drone doesn't work, like if somebody asked us to map right in front of the end of the runway at Dublin Airport, I might have to decline. We have operated in and around airports, it's no problem for us, but when an airport is so busy that there's no gap between the aeroplanes, then they tend not to want the drone guy in there.

[00:02:42] In terms of disadvantages, probably the biggest one, as I said, is precision. The accuracy, it's not as, the accuracies of a drone survey are not as good as a traditional survey. But when you're talking about things like vegetation and grass heights and all that sort of thing, you can kind of get caught up in the details. Let's say if the end result is a guy with an excavator coming in and digging holes, maybe you don't need 5 millimeters of accuracy because I don't think the guy with the excavator is operating to that. So, you know, those are the sorts of things to consider when looking at the disadvantages.

[00:03:19]You mentioned cost. Typically, drone surveys are not as expensive at all as traditional surveys. They're a lot less intensive in terms of field data capture. So they're a lot easier. It's a lot easier to capture with a drone than it is, especially in large areas of land. The economies of scale get much bigger once you go up in size.

Interviewer: That's a great one, actually, because that could be a bit of a myth buster if people thought it was the other way around in their head without asking or, you know, that they don't have that situation.

[00:03:55]Yeah, look for sure. If you have a garden and you want it mapped, you can just get a traditional survey and it'll take them an hour to do it. If you have a farm and you want it mapped, it could take a week, whereas we can do it in a day, you know, easily.