What’s that buzzing? Why, unmanned aerial vehicles, of course.
From Summit County to Denver’s Central Business District, drones — frequently called unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs by industry professionals — are being put to work on construction sites across Colorado these days, part of a national trend as business owners get better acquainted with the devices’ capabilities, the savings they can generate and the federal guidelines regulating them.
The propeller-powered machines are taking progress photos, creating topographical maps, performing inspections and knocking out other tasks that would otherwise require significant man hours or a helicopter to achieve. And the trajectory of their commercial use is trending upward.
“There has been an explosion in the use of drones” for commercial purposes, said Bill Emison, an unmanned aircraft systems industry consultant based in Denver. “For construction, especially big projects, it’s a no-brainer.”
Weekly drone flights have been a standard part of PCL Construction’s ongoing overhaul of a Colorado Department of Transportation snow plow facility in Silverthorne. Flying autonomously with human supervision, the resident drone regularly flies a grid pattern over the property to create a high-resolution map and 3-D model accurate to within a half inch, company officials say.
“We can use that (map) in a number of different ways,” said Chris Lierheimer, a PCL field coordinator and a licensed commercial drone pilot. “We have been overlaying our contract documents onto this map. We can compare the drawings to what has been done in the field and spot discrepancies. It allows us to be more efficient and prevent rework by spotting them early on.”
PCL, which has its U.S. headquarters in Denver, has 14 pilots and 13 drones licensed with the Federal Aviation Administration, Lierheimer said. It launched its unmanned aircraft program around four years ago, and uses a software platform from tech firm 3D Robotics to program flights and collect, process and view data.
The hardware isn’t cheap. The DJI brand Phantom 4 Pro with a 4K camera Lierheimer is using in Silverthorne cost PCL around $1,300. (Higher-end drones and camera/advanced sensor packages can cost tens of thousands of dollars.) But the aircraft, training and certification that go into the program pay their way, Leirheimer said. Drones improve safety by performing potentially dangerous inspections in hard-to-reach areas. They collect and process information faster than traditional surveying and with greater detail. A drone can fly over a 10-acre site in 15 minutes, and two or three hours later, produce measurements of all the materials piled there, Lierheimer said. Surveyors could take a day to collect data, and two or three more to process and return findings to the job site.
“It doesn’t replace ground-based surveying — particularly when it comes to laying out new buildings — but it does have efficiencies,” Lierheimer said.
Safety is paramount for PCL and other commercial companies riding the unmanned aerial wave in Colorado. All PCL staff that operate drones have passed a written test and obtained a remote pilot certificate under the FAA’s. Pilots always keep drones in their line of sight, do not fly them more than 400 feet above the tallest structure on a property and fly only during daylight hours, in accordance with FAA rules. PCL gets property owner approval before flights, checks airspace data to ensure there is no chance to interfere with airports or helipads and creates flight-specific checklists that account for weather, wind and other factors, Lierheimer said.
As of Dec. 15, 107,594 drones had been registered in the U.S. with the FAA for commercial use under Part 107, agency officials say. Prior to establishment of Part 107, commercial drone operations were authorized on a case-by-case basis. Now licensed operators can skip calling the feds so long as they adhere to the rules.
An example of the FAA’s increased faith in drone safety can be found at . Richard Lopez, the company’s virtual design and construction manager, has federal approval to fly a drone within Orlando International Airport’s strictly controlled airspace this week as his company prepares to build new facilities there.
“They were really convinced we could fly and conduct a mission in their airspace in a safe and responsible manner,” Lopez said.
A hobbyist and volunteer pilot for Boulder County search and rescue operations, Lopez helped build Hensel Phelps’ unmanned aerial systems program from the ground up starting about four years ago. The employee-owned company embraced the technology in part because of the steep price — $14,000 in one instance — of hiring a helicopter company to capture aerial images of job sites, he said. Hensel Phelps now has 12 FAA certified drone pilots, including Lopez, who can be dispatched anywhere in the world.
In 2016, Lopez used a drone to do secondary inspections of wall and structural steel connections on the lower floors of 1144 Fifteenth, a 40-story office tower in downtown Denver. Lopez is hoping to run a thermal analysis of the building, but with its height and the amount of signal interference possible in a dense, busy urban setting, he is not convinced of the operation would be safe just yet.
“We are working with drone manufacturers to get a suitable drone,” Lopez said of the task. “We have to feel comfortable that we have an air frame that can fly that project.”
Emison, who recently left a post as communications director of , said he knows of more than 40 companies doing business in the drone industry that have opened in Colorado over the last two years. That includes , an authorized dealer for DJI, one of the leading drones sellers in the world.
Construction has been fast to embrace drone use because of its cost effectiveness, Emison said, but many other industries are following suit. Amazon’s plans to eventually air-drop packages on customers’ front lawns via drone are well-documented. Drone-shot video footage is already a common fixture in marketing materials and media coverage. Xcel Energy has an internal drone program with . The Colorado General Assembly ordering a study of how unmanned aerial systems could be put to work in firefighting, search and rescue, accident reconstruction and other public safety capacities.
“I think the exciting part about the industry is we’re poised to touch everything,” Emison said.
That certainly is the way Jason Hatt feels. In September, he an his wife opened a , a “drones as service” company that outfits customers with drones, certified pilots, FAA approvals and data analysis services. The construction industry has been a key customer early on, Hatt said, but Measure markets itself to energy, telecommunications, agriculture and media companies, among others. In the early going, much of Hatt’s time has been spent educating customers on UAS capabilities and demonstrating its value, but he is hopeful that as knowledge of the industry expands, he’ll start fielding referrals.
“So far, I think the industry is so new, there is nothing typical yet,” Hatt said. “It seems like every client we’ve talked to wants something with a different twist or turn to it.”
Potential barriers remain to the proliferation of commercial drone use. , who has been studying unnamed vehicles for 20 years, said that if regulators fail to keep up with the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles it could impede expansion and usefulness. Frew, who is now leading the , said that as more advanced systems emerge — such as on-board obstacle avoidance — it will be key for researchers to provide hard data to assess the capabilities of those systems and for regulators to use that a data to create clear frameworks and benchmarks for safe operations.
With the FAA’s strict rules mandating that all drones have a human observer at the controls, Frew said he’s doesn’t think drone technology will be putting people out of jobs anytime soon, but people in construction and other impacted industries who ignore the technology do so at their own peril.
“I think certain skills will need to shift but I don’t think the technology will just put everyone out of business,” Frew said. “But companies need to be technology-forward if you’re a surveying company or a construction company.”
