DRONE CONSTRUCTION SITE MONITORING
SERVICES IN AFRICA

The Drone market has been booming with increased sales and revenue in the past decade. Their advantages, especially in the construction industry, have transformed the sector towards enhanced efficiency and accuracy. Construction project managers often map the job-site every week, employing UAVs or drones. Routine surveying is fundamental for tracing development, safety inspections, and real-time quality monitoring. Drones allow users to get a bird-eye-view on the entire project and reveal concerns that would be impossible at ground level inspections. Geotagging capabilities of drone maps enable the capture of necessary area measurement and transform it into an estimated stockpile volume for quick, reliable decision-making. Firstly, the digitization of job sites has given rise to a broad perspective of the entire construction project in just a single snapshot required by developers. Secondly, the representation of land as an orthomosaic map, which is a sequence of individual photos linked together via software, contributes an in-depth analysis as they can estimate true distances. Thirdly, the data can also be mirrored as 3D models via multiple 3D points of the site to give life to the constructor's perspective of their project. A complete 360 view of the job site allows clients, stakeholders, and even the workers to gain insight about the project, but safely. That's not it! Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can also generate Computer-Aided Design (CAD) overlays and see whether their activity has diverged from the design plans. With a plethora of drone models available in the market, they all produce high-resolution images tailored accordingly for topographic support, lens distortion, and camera tilt. Drone technology has allowed the construction industry to display their projects in ways they would never have envisioned. The team gets the bigger-picture and moves towards efficiency, productivity, and informed decision-making.