I'm John Torek. And I'm Danny Sullivan. And you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you the stories of the engineers and architects who are transforming the world one project at a time. Today, we continue with part two of our look at how drones are being used in the AEC industry. From surveying the wreckage of a train derailment, to monitoring whale migration, to creating a digital twin of a 160 foot high dam, drones are bringing new perspectives to projects of all kinds.
Just being able to get that bird's eye view, I guess, it's almost like you are flying. It's almost like you are a pilot yourself. So I really think that's what I enjoy most about it, getting perspectives that not everybody else can get. That's Jeremy Zemek, a senior environmental technician in HDR's Calgary office. Jeremy got his degree in environmental sciences from Lethbridge College. His interest in drones came later. It's just kind of a personal hobby of mine when they first started.
I would just buy those little micro drones and fly them around my house. When they first started coming out, I always thought they would be such a great tool to have on the job. Much like in The US, where commercial pilots take a written test to get an FAA part one zero seven license, Canadian pilots get a pilot certificate. It's all regulated by Transport Canada. We have two different pilot certificates in Canada. One is called the basic certificate.
So you're able to fly it in all non classified airspace. You're limited to how close you can fly to people, over top people not included in your project. So that would be the basic pilot certificate. And then that advanced pilot certificate, you're able to fly within controlled airspace closer to people. Transport Canada also requires a flight exam with a flight reviewer before you can fly. The airspace in Canada has similar restrictions to The US.
So if you're within three nautical miles of an aerodrome, they classify an aerodrome as your hospital airports. The little tiny room municipal airports are just aerodomes. It's just literally a phone call to the aerodome to let them know you're flying. They'll let you know if there's any restrictions. And then airports are a lot different. You actually need a permit from Transport Canada to be able to fly in a restricted airspace.
Jeremy immediately recognized how much a drone could improve his team's reports and environmental assessments, covering kilometers upon kilometers of terrain for commercial and industrial clients. So our figure used to always be these old Google blurry images of who knows what you're even looking at. And just getting a drone in the air, taking a picture and, you know, editing it by hand by just throwing on some circles and some words explaining things, I thought
was such a great value added. Shortly after getting his certification and becoming his firm's first drone pilot in Canada, Jeremy had a client call on him with a pressing need. After applying an emergency break, 31 cars from a train traveling 70 kilometers per hour derailed, including 26 cars carrying crude oil. As a precaution, six homes in the area were evacuated. Thankfully, there were no injuries and no fire. The railroad spring into action
to assess the damage. I was called at 09:00 at night in the middle of winter, February, minus 30 degrees Celsius, and they had a derailment that they wanted me to respond to. The drone's perspective could offer a faster, more holistic picture of the accident site. Taking pictures with your phone, texting it to your client doesn't really give them great perspective on the actual incident. So getting a bird's eye view in the air for for the client, to me, was
always such a value added thing. So I'd be there on a consultant dealing with soil, groundwater, hazardous materials on the ground, as well as supervising contractors and teaming on coming up with a plan on how to clean everything up. To make it happen, Jeremy got on the phone with his project manager, completed a job hazard analysis, submitted a flight plan for review, and hit the road. They wanted me there first thing in the morning, and it was a six
hour drive. I responded at 09:00 at night, had all my paperwork in order, and we were off the ground in the air at 07:30 in the morning, first light. Watching that drone take off from the ground through the bit of ice fog and seeing that those first images of the derailment itself and add pictures to back to the client before 08:00 in the morning, and they were able to make some decisions
on what they wanted to do. Every job may not have the intensity of an emergency response to a train derailment, but Jeremy has been involved in other projects looking at interesting ways to use the drone. For, like, a lot of construction projects, pipeline projects, you know, anywhere where there's right away occurring or anything, destruction activity during or nest times. So we have to do it for next
week. Well, usually, typically, that was biologists going to the field on their feet, trying to find these nets, doing transects, trying not to step on these nest that are or it's nesting on the ground, trying to find these nest 15 meters up in deciduous trees. A location much easier spotted from the air. So the idea of using these drones with thermal cameras are you're able to get a hundred feet up in the air by overhead and
block these nests. And rather than having these biologists trample all over the place and trample everything down, they're able to get in and out, do their ground truthing on these nests and with minimal damage. A solution that's safer and more efficient for the biologists and less intrusive on the habitat. Keeping personnel out of the field out of harm's way rather than having somebody trudge through kilometers of bush to take a picture, you can just send a drone in a matter of minutes.
It would have taken biologists a lot, lot longer to find these bird nests if they could even find them at all. Birds aren't the only species being monitored by drones. In fact, they're helping track a much larger animal. So we've been using drones on the Navy project for the Atlantic Fleet Of The Navy for a little over two years. Last year, we've added drone capability to the Pacific fleet of the navy as well. So we're leveraging drones to, capture various marine mammals from humpback wells to
endangered beaked wells. That's Carlos Femmer, HDR's director of data acquisition, who we met in our previous episode. I recall getting a call from the team when they returned from a deployment, and they had video footage of a school of endangered beaked wells. They seemed pretty pumped since this particular species spooks pretty easily, and we have not captured, via traditional methods to date. By understanding whale migration patterns, the work is helping to reduce the number of
ships striking whales in Chesapeake Bay. So, typically, you come in close with a boat. And if you're on the deck, you're gonna try to video and take pictures. So us being able to hover overhead, they captured a ton of footage and had to return, not because the the wells went away, but because the battery capacity. So that's when you know you're using the right tool for the job is, pretty exciting. On land, surveying is another area where drones vastly improve the speed and precision of data
collection. Specific to earthwork measurements, it's a great tool. Surveying a site via manual traditional methods is one way to get earthworks, and that method's gonna generate hundreds of points or thousands of points. With the drone, you're capturing hundreds of thousands of points to millions of points. In addition, you can scan the site in minutes versus days. It's such an important thing to know how much material is entering and
leaving the site. And then specific to construction monitoring, you can create daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly site visit reports, and you can obtain high resolution photography and video or survey measurements to QC existing work that's taking place. They also expand what can be done with the topographic ground survey. There are two primary ways of surveying with drones, one from photogrammetry and one from lidar tied to survey control. Which one you choose depends on the site
and vegetation. For example, if you have, mostly hard surfaces, then, photogrammetry tied to ground control points is a great option. If you have a lot of vegetation and you need bare earth, you will need a lidar system to penetrate the canopy to get good survey data. There are also limitations where you cannot get subsurface elements like subsurface utilities or boundary, but it's a tremendous tool to complement the survey toolkit.
Cameron Schafer, a colleague of CARLIS, is a data acquisition liaison to HDR's transportation group. Photography for data acquisition was actually a project down here in Southern California. It was a roadway interchange pursuit that we were going after. We rented a helicopter. And we had Mike Cameron, one of our corporate photographers, who was coming out anyways to take a few vantage points of this proposal.
Mike is the photographer we met in the last episode, and this was before he'd become a drone pilot. And we had this crazy idea to work with Mike and say, hey, instead of taking four pictures, why don't we take 400 pictures? And let's try to capture this project site from multiple different angles. Because if we can get a 60% overlap with each of these different photos, we think we can tie all of these photos to ground survey and create a photorealistic
three d survey grade model. And that's exactly what we did. So they run at a helicopter, and Mike took pictures as the pilot circled the site over and over and over again. You know, maybe twenty, thirty different circles over the project site. So Mike is up there in the helicopter taking pictures as it's spinning around. I was down on the ground watching him fly up above the project site in multiple circles, capturing as as many pictures as he possibly could.
And we took that data and only spending another fifteen minutes or so up in the air. And he didn't tell me this until after it was all done, but, it it was apparently a little bit too much spinning. Though it left Mike feeling like he'd just come from an amusement park, he captured an incredible catalog of high resolution photography. Cameron's team had new data to get creative
with. We were able to to tie all of these photos together and get a a three d model that we could create any vantage point or any view from rather than just having a singular photo. So from that first project, that kinda kick started this whole idea of utilizing drones, reality mesh models. Cameron further defined the term reality mesh. So a reality mesh, the simplest way to put it, it's a photo realistic
survey grade accurate three d model. So if you've ever used or seen Google Earth and you've seen that kind of realistic context, that's what a reality mesh is. Only difference is you have the capability to get a much higher accuracy within that mesh. And the the way that we're able to do that is taking extremely high resolution photos with proprietary and upgraded camera systems. And then taking those photos and tying them to ground control survey through a process called aerotriangulation.
And what that effectively delivers is this photo realistic context that can be brought into a variety of different native design applications. The aerial photography of the interchange project made it clear to Cameron that a drone could expand those type of services. It was really kind of a pivotal moment when we took that mesh that we only wanted for visualization, tied it to survey, and saw how close and how accurate that mesh was to actual ground control survey and surfaces and topo that
we had captured. It really kinda opened up the door to really investigating this more for utilizing drones, utilizing reality mesh for actual survey to getting into a few centimeters worth of accuracy. And that's really to me what that project kinda spearheaded. Applications for this technology have increased exponentially from there. And it can also be converted into
variety of different file types. So point clouds, for example, you can take that same reality mesh and generate a point cloud dataset from it that's nice and colorized and can be utilized in conjunction with whatever programs you're using that may use point clouds more efficiently than a reality mesh file type. So it's just another tool. It's a better way to understand the built world, and it just puts more information at your fingertips where you need it and when you need
it. Clients have increasingly requested the use of drones to offer new perspectives of their projects and inspect hard to reach infrastructure. Carlos Femmer notes that HDR's drone program made history when they completed the first ever drone bridge inspection for the Michigan Department of Transportation in 02/2018. And the Utah Department of Transportation first requested drone bridge inspections last year. With any of these new technologies, I think there's always a barrier to entry.
Right? And understanding how it can be used, how it can be integrated into the client's kinda standard operating procedures. And I think, you know, Utah DOT is probably a great example. We help them with their bridge inspection program. And the first time we went out, we flew 22 bridges and used drones and reality meshes to do the actual bridge inspection. As is often the case, the Utah Department of Transportation loved what they saw through the eyes or
the lens of a drone. And then what that kind of ultimately led into, and I think this is a natural progression that we see with many of our clients is they get used to the data, they get comfortable with utilizing the data, and you see the opportunity to expand on it and do more with it and the time saved and the efficiency. And that's exactly what happened with Utah DOT. Because the next year, they came back and said, we wanna expand the drones for bridge inspection to well over 750
of our bridges. And I think that's just something that's gonna continue to grow. Cameron said one of their more noteworthy inspection projects took place at the Diablo Dam in North Cascades National Park between Seattle and Vancouver. It was the first time Seattle City Light used a drone for a dam survey. Our client had come and asked to create this digital twin or reality mesh of the the dam, and I think it was first really
looked at for inspection purposes. Essentially, taking the very adventurous endeavor of inspecting a 60 foot high dam and making it digital. How can we limit the amount of time spent scaling down the wall of this dam?
And that's where the idea of the reality mesh came in to deliver this digital twin of the face of the dam, various different aspects connecting to it, and being able to use that mesh to come in and analyze from your office chair rather than in person cracks and monitoring those cracks over time, being able
to take precise measurements of that. We're able to take that mesh that was produced, learn from it, train upon it, and use artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically point out where these cracks may be happening and help to trend them over time. Cameron's team continues to look for more creative ways to take the wealth of data collected by drones and make it even more useful for clients. You can have all this great data. You can have terabytes of incredibly rich
data. But if you're turning that over to the client without the instruction manual on how to use it and best practices and understanding the client's needs, how are you gonna use this data? Which programs are you gonna use this data for? What's the accuracy that you're shooting for? Because in a lot of cases, it's something very easy that we can redeliver in or change to custom suit their needs.
One of the next logical extensions is to basically take that dam or bridge and allow someone to walk around like they're in a video game or to allow a client to experience a proposed facility in that lifelike virtual world before the design is complete and construction has begun. In our industry, traditionally, we spend so much time building these incredibly rich models of a three d environment to replicate the look and the feel and
the surroundings that we're designing into. So when we hand over the VR or the AR model to the client, they're able to step into the world virtually and see that existing context. And it immediately relates. Right? Because it looks and it feels exactly like what is truly out there. And it really adds a lot of context and understanding because it is survey grade accurate as to how these proposed concepts truly will identify
and work with the built environment. Which has become an even more valuable service during a time with fewer in person meetings and more clients working remotely. And being able to generate these highly, highly accurate, very detailed meshes that can be explored from anybody's house, whether they've got a VR headset or we set up a viewer for them online. Being able to navigate that from home is it just provides a lot more detail and kind of that on demand access of what's
needed. All the rapid technological advances make this moment an exciting time in the industry. I think similar to what we saw back in the day when we transitioned from two d plans to to two d CAD and then transitioning from two d CAD to three d BIM. We're constantly in this evolution of how products are changing, of how we can do more work, of how we can do better work, of how we can do more accurate work.
And I think we're kind of in that next revolution right now of technology, of going not just from a three d model, but to an intelligent digital twin. Right? To a model that is going to morph and change and live on with the life cycle of our projects. And I think the reality mesh is a key component to that. So I think we're just at that tipping point right now. As the end uses of vast amounts of data evolve, Carlos Fema said so too will drone technology. Sensors are truly getting smaller,
less weight, and with increased quality. Prices are coming down, and that's gonna also help with new ways of capturing data in the future. Another aspect is I've been impressed with fixed wing drones as well. There are some drones like the Wingtra that take off, vertical take off and landing, and I think we're gonna have more automated flights to enable safer capture of assets. Yes. Automated.
The future may hold automated drones. With the actual drone itself in programming flights, the ability where you have clash detection and automate flights to keep them safe and that has the intelligence to try to keep you away from failing or from crashing, you have all of those items where those technologies continue to improve. It's gonna open the door for more drone pilots, safer operations,
and, more value for, clients. But as Carlos adds, present day is the moment people will look back on when it comes to the presence of drone technology in our lives. I believe people will look back at this era as the beginning of the drone era. Drones have been around for ten years, but it's currently moving rapidly, and I think it's similar to other technologies. For example, thinking back to to Bill Gates, he had a a clear mission, you know, a computer on every desk and in every home.
Steve Jobs says something to the effect of the Internet in your pocket when referring to the iPhone. So although I do not believe everyone in the future will own a drone, I do believe everyone will be impacted by them. And if I think of Amazon package deliveries or lifesaving medical deliveries, some of those things will be around that you don't see today. I believe people are gonna look back at this era with amazement.
We're still at the infancy stage, and it's really exciting currently to think about where drones will be in one year, five years, and ten years down the road. For more information on this podcast, visit hdrinc.com/speakingofdesign. You'll find links to pictures, articles, and more information about this project. If you like what you heard, be sure to rate us or leave feedback on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.