Two companies are bringing construction and drone technology together. 3D Robotics (3DR) has announced that they will work in tandem with Autodesk’s Forge Platform. This would lead to the drones using cloud services, developed apps and SDKs with the Forge Platform, opening up the world of construction.
“Capturing site data today is costly, time-consuming, and often dangerous. Drones can easily go where it’s inefficient or unsafe for field personnel, making it easier to accurately measure our world so we can better manage it,” says Chris Anderson, the CEO of 3DR.
He further went on to celebrate the FORGE platform and ensure that this would “help business customers save time and money” as well as ensuring more on-site safety.
3DR would be utilizing certain APIs from FORGE such as their ReCap Photo web application that would allow drones to perform inspections, “surveys and scans of worksites”. Something that would take human construction workers much longer to perform.
“The real value is that it is super easy to set up,” Goerge Hatch, the senior technical specialist at Autodesk said, speaking of the flying of the drone to scan for existing conditions on a construction site.
The drone can fly on a path that is pre-drawn, pre-planned and executed from a tablet computer and then the drone does the rest. Downloading the data and exporting it to the Autodesk apps look easy enough for any construction worker to learn.
“Sometimes we want to build a model in the context of our surrounding,” says George Hatch. He says that this is easier with the geo-reference data that drones can collect as they fly around. What takes hours or days is now a streamlined process with automated drones on construction sites.
