What are drone surveys?

Interviewer:

[00:02] How would you describe what a drone survey is? And then secondly, what kinds of professionals or industries usually rely on them in your experience?

Bob Foley: Engineers with Drones

[00:00:14] Yeah, absolutely. A great question. And one of the first things you got to lock in is what is a drone survey? Because to different people, a drone survey means very different things.

There's 2 broad categories. One is surveying of land. And what they mean by that is mapping of land.

So large or small areas of land where you survey it in the traditional sense, you map it out, the features of it, the topography of it, what's on it, what's maybe underneath it, all that sort of thing. And that is a drone survey, but it is more correctly a drone mapping survey of land.

[00:00:48] The other use of the word drone survey is drone inspections.

So infrastructure like electrical infrastructure or hydroelectric dam or a building or something like that could have a drone survey carried out on it, but that would be more accurately described as a drone inspection, where you were going in with a drone and looking at all facets of this particular asset.

[00:01:25] So those are the sort of two broad areas that drone surveys capture. There are other ones like a traffic survey, for example. You park a drone close to a busy interchange and you monitor it for a day to see the traffic levels. That's quite a common thing. You can do all sorts of other bits and pieces, but those would be the main things.

[00:01:47] The industries that would use it, the big ones would be... Drones are used and drone surveys are used extensively in energy. We do a lot of mapping of solar farms for development. So a farmer decides he no longer wants to farm cows. They now want to farm sun and they want to turn all their fields into a solar farm. So they get a development company and they talk to us. We come in and we map large areas of land, you know, a couple of 100 hectares or something like that, sometimes thousands, and turn that into a technical deliverable.

That will be energy, building will be the same in construction, in the pre-planning phase, planning, pre-construction, all that sort of stuff. Surveys are carried out to see what the land looks like or maybe look at cut and fill or something like that. What else?

Agriculture. forestry, things like that, they would perform a lot of surveys to see, maybe they want to look at drainage, maybe they want to look at what the trees are like on a given area of land, the vegetation, maybe they want to see through it, all that sort of thing.

[00:03:01] Sort of people who'd use them would be like architects, planners, engineers, designers, ecologists, anybody who wants a data set of what is right now about a piece of land or an asset or something like that, they will use drone surveys.