What Are Drone Surveys (Video) | Engineers with Drones

Key takeaways

"Drone survey" usually means either mapping land or inspecting assets.

Industries include energy, construction, and agriculture/forestry.

Professionals who use them: architects, planners, engineers, designers, ecologists.

Great for coverage and safety on large or hazardous sites.

What is a drone survey? It depends who you ask.

The phrase "drone survey" is one of those terms that sounds self-explanatory until you actually try to pin it down. In practice, it covers a surprisingly wide range of work - and the professionals who use it often mean very different things by it. "To different people, a drone survey means very different things," says Bob Foley, founder of Engineers With Drones. Getting clear on the distinction matters, because the technology, the deliverables and the entire approach differ depending on which type you need.

The two broad categories

"There are two broad categories," Bob explains. "One is surveying of land - and what they mean by that is mapping of land." This is the traditional sense of the word survey: you are capturing the features, topography, and characteristics of a piece of land in precise detail. What is on it, what is underneath it, how it drains, how it rises and falls. The output is a technical dataset - typically a point cloud, an orthophoto, a 3D model, or a combination - that engineers, planners and designers can work from.

The second category is quite different. "The other use of the word drone survey is drone inspections," Bob says. Here, the drone is not mapping open land - it is going in close to a specific asset to examine its condition. An electrical substation, a building facade, a bridge, a dam. The drone captures detailed imagery of every surface and element, and the output is a condition report rather than a map. Same drone, same pilot, entirely different purpose.

There are other applications - traffic surveys, environmental monitoring, site security - but mapping and inspection cover the vast majority of what Engineers With Drones is called in for.

The industries that rely on drone surveys

Drone surveys have become embedded in several industries where large areas, hazardous conditions or hard-to-reach assets make traditional methods slow, costly or unsafe.

Energy is one of the biggest users. Solar farm development is a good example: a landowner decides to convert agricultural land into a solar farm, a development company comes on board, and Engineers With Drones are brought in to map hundreds of hectares and produce the technical deliverables the project needs to move forward. Wind energy, power grid infrastructure and oil and gas facilities all use drone surveys extensively too.

Construction relies on drone surveys at multiple stages - pre-planning, planning, and throughout the build. Capturing accurate topographic data before a single machine moves onto site, monitoring progress, assessing cut and fill requirements: these are all jobs where a drone survey is faster and more precise than traditional methods.

Agriculture and forestry use drone surveys to understand what is happening across large areas of land - drainage patterns, vegetation health, tree cover and density, what lies beneath a canopy. For forestry in particular, a LiDAR-equipped drone can map terrain through a tree canopy that would be completely opaque to a camera.

Who actually commissions drone surveys?

The end users are typically the professionals who need a precise, current dataset of a place or an asset. "Architects, planners, engineers, designers, ecologists - anybody who wants a data set of what is right now about a piece of land or an asset," Bob says. What they have in common is a need for accurate, detailed information that would take weeks to gather through traditional methods and can now be delivered in days.

Full transcript

Show transcript

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.

Drone survey FAQs

What is a drone survey?

Bob Foley, founder of Engineers With Drones describes two broad categories of drone surveys. 1. Drone mapping surveys of land, which involve mapping features, topography, and what's on or underneath the land. 2. Drone inspections of assets like electrical infrastructure, buildings, or dams to identify defects and create reports.

Who relies on drone surveys?

Drone surveys are widely used in industries such as energy, construction and agriculture/forestry. Professionals like architects, planners, engineers, designers, and ecologists also utilise drone surveys to obtain accurate data about land or assets.

What are drone surveys?