What Can You Do With What We Produce?

The drone industry spends a lot of time asking one question:

What can the drone produce?

• An orthomosaic.

• A point cloud.

• A 3D model.

• A digital surface model.

• Progress photographs.

• Measurements.Contours.

Those are useful answers.

But they may be answers to the wrong question.

The better question is:

What can the project team do with what we produce?

That changes the conversation.

A 3D model may be impressive to look at. But what happens when a superintendent can use that model to identify a specific location on a project?

What happens when an engineer can look at the same location and respond?

What happens when observations, questions and decisions can be associated with the place where they actually matter—not buried in an email thread, meeting notes or a folder containing hundreds of photographs?

And what happens when the site is documented again a month later?

Now the value isn't simply the model.

It's the record.

The Deliverable Shouldn't Be the End

Aerial data is often treated as a finished product.

Fly the site. Process the imagery. Deliver the files.

Done.

But construction doesn't work that way.

The site continues changing after the drone lands. Earth moves. Utilities disappear underground. Concrete gets poured. Drainage changes. Materials arrive. Problems emerge. Problems get corrected.

A useful aerial record should help people understand those changes.

That means thinking beyond what the aircraft can capture and asking how the information can become part of the project's working environment.

• Can someone identify a concern?

• Can another team member find exactly what they're talking about?

• Can the observation be tied to a location?

• Can that location be revisited during the next capture?

• Can someone six months from now understand what existed there six months earlier?

Those questions have very little to do with drones.

They have everything to do with information.

From Picture to Place

There is an important difference between looking at a photograph of a construction site and being able to move through a spatial representation of that site.

A photograph says:

Look at this.

A spatial record can potentially say:

Look right here.

That's a much more powerful sentence.

Because construction happens in places.

An issue isn't simply "in photograph 1847."

• It's beside this inlet.

• Along this curb.

• At this excavation.

• Behind this structure.

• On this section of pavement.

When project information can be connected to the physical place it describes, aerial documentation becomes something more than imagery.

It becomes context.

And Then Time Gets Involved

Now repeat the process.

June.

July.

August.

September.

The same project exists in several different states.

Something visible in June may be buried by August. An excavation present in July may be pavement in September. Materials staged in one location may disappear entirely during the next phase.

Each capture preserves another moment.

Taken individually, they're useful records.

Connected together, they begin to tell the history of the project.

And that may ultimately be one of the most valuable things aerial data can provide.

Not simply a better picture of what's there today.

A way to understand what was there, what changed, where it changed and when.

So perhaps the next evolution of construction drone services isn't another sensor, another aircraft or another processing technique.

Perhaps it's asking a better question.

Not:

What can the drone produce?

But:

What can the construction team do with what we produce?

THE FLYING LIZARD®

Aviation-Driven Drone Intelligence™

Where People and Data Take Flight™