Oracle Construction Drone Challenge Tests Pilots' Skills

Abstract

As drone photography, reality capture and site scanning continue to grow in importance for contractors, so have the skills of the pilots. "It's NIST. It's a standard we can compare performance to objectively," said Gregg Schkade, senior capture, lead pilot and data lead at 3D reality-capture specialists VTS, based in Brighton, Mich. Schkade competed with three other drone pilots at the Oracle event: Bryan Prignano, technical services project manager at Pepper Construction in Chicago; Keaton Denzer, chief UAV pilot at Bechtel Equipment Operations in Houston; and Antoine Tissier, drone operations manager for Clayco's VDC team in Chicago. "The future is bright. As we get more autonomous operations and [use] human pilots less, [we can] focus on data collection and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning."Oracle's construction drone challenge was friendly, but performance times were recorded. After scanning the targets and performing 180° spins, the four pilots had to race back to the starting line and land their drones in the target where their run began. Schkade's drone could spin faster than the others with collision detection turned off, but his Autel Robotics EVO 2 was not as fast on straightaway flying as the other three pilots' DJI Mavic devices. While all of the pilots enjoyed the friendly competition, they said the programming of drones for inspections, site scans and other important construction tasks can and should be automated, preferably to rigorous in-house standards like they have in their own firms. Confined spaces on sites also present challenges for drone pilots, they said.