Partner Article

Drones Take Flight

Pizza dropping from the skies? Really? A recent CNN article covering Domino’s testing of drone pizza delivery is food for thought about the mainstreaming of drones. The article tells us that a Domino’s customer who requests a drone delivery will receive a notification when their delivery is approaching. After going outside and hitting a button on their smartphone, the drone will lower the food via a tether. Once the package is released, the drone pulls the tether back up and flies back to the Domino’s store. The utilities industry, along with government entities providing regulations, is also exploring the use of drones to capitalise on lower cost photography for monitoring and modeling of utilities infrastructure. Really! Today, LiDAR 3D models help utilities monitor rights of way, encroachments, and manage vegetation effectively today and point clouds are used in hybrid engineering workflows to model existing utilities infrastructure. But new reality modelling applications are emerging at the forefront of modelling utilities infrastructure with photographs.

Reality modelling for utilities with which you can produce accurate 3D models from simple, digital photographs of existing conditions and infrastructure is rapidly becoming an important, cost-effective technology for capturing the built environment to provide real-world context for the use of planning, design and construction. Reality modelling also provides continuous surveying opportunities for operations and maintenance teams who manage the life of these infrastructure assets – making it almost as easy as ordering a pizza!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Bentley Systems .