Drone Use Soars in Transportation Construction

By JOHN SCHNEIDAWIND

When a 2020 landslide and pavement cracks wiped out four lanes of Route 231 near Laceys Spring, Alabama, it was anyone’s guess when the busy highway near Huntsville would re-open to traffic. That’s why J.D. D’Arville deployed the Alabama Department of Transportation’s fleet of unmanned aerial systems (UAS). This drone air force surveyed the damage and gathered key data about how to fix the highway.

‘The key thing for us was getting the data and information to our contractors and the people who were making the design changes quickly and efficiently,’ said D’Arville, the state agency’s UAS program administrator. ‘It worked out great for us. We completed the project in seven months, with two new bridges.’

A 2019 survey by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) found that 36 states were using drones equipped with high-definition cameras for a host of transportation construction applications, including inspections and incident response operations. Anticipating this trend about seven years ago, ARTBA formed a member task force to review current and emerging industry uses of UAS, began meeting with numerous federal and state officials, and started advocating for regulatory changes to improve efficiencies and while maintaining high standards of safety.

Drones are impacting transportation project sites in at least three key ways:

• Keeping transportation construction workers safe. Traditional bridge inspection requires setting up temporary work zones, detouring traffic, and using heavy equipment. UAS technology can speed data collection while reducing risk to work crews and the traveling public.
• Speeding up project completion. UAS technology can accelerate the rate at which information such as survey or aerial photography is collected for project planners. Drones also provide more accurate estimates for how much material is needed for projects.
• Maintenance. The ability to consistently map terrain and existing transportation infrastructure over time can help anticipate problems before they become emergencies, saving lives and reducing costs. In an emergency, UAS technology can quickly and inexpensively survey the damage, allowing for better-informed and efficient recovery operations.

‘By using drones, workers can do all the necessary work without needing to walk through the site,’ said John Frost, vice president of business development at Propeller, a drone-mapping software firm. ‘With significant labor shortages still impacting the industry, technology such as drone surveying allows workers to be more efficient, while also adding a layer of safety.’

Yet a successful UAS program is more than just flying drones over transportation projects and taking pictures. The amount of information drones capture in those images can quickly overwhelm users unless there’s a quick and seamless way to understand and utilize the feedback they create, said D’Arville. ‘When you’re doing 2,600 flights a year on construction projects—which is what we’ve been averaging—I had to have something that we could use to quickly fly, upload the data, get it processed and get it out to our contractor end-users,’ he said.

D’Arville hired DroneDeploy, a San Francisco-based company that sells a reality capture and visualization platform for aerial and ground robots. According to DroneDeploy CEO Mike Winn, the company’s software has been used by customers to map and analyze more than 200 million acres in over 200 countries. The software enables users to collect, manage, and interpret the massive amounts of data collected by drones by processing scalable images, storing data and creating maps and 3D models that help users get a more accurate view of the landscape under construction.

Without an accurate way to capture and analyze the data from drones, Winn says, ‘there’s no way project managers can walk entire sites on a regular basis and understand what’s going on.’

John Schneidawind is ARTBA’s vice president of public affairs. This story appeared in the May/June issue of ARTBA’s Transportation Builder magazine.