3D Robotics (3DR) recently teamed up with the City of Atlanta’s Department of Aviation, Autodesk and engineering firm Atkins to conduct drone surveys at the city’s bustling Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
According to an article from 3DR itself, the Federal Aviation Administration-approved flights, using 3DR’s Site Scan drone platform, took place at Atkins’ construction site in between runways at the airport, which 3DR describes as “the busiest airport in the world.” In order to make room for a new hotel, Atkins is working on a rebuild of a parking garage, and 3DR and its partners deployed the unmanned aircraft to “capture the existing site conditions.”
In November, 3DR launched building information modeling (BIM) capabilities within its Site Scan software. Site Scan, an end-to-end application offering fully autonomous drone image capture and cloud integration with Autodesk, offers construction professionals the ability to use a drone as a BIM tool.
The seven drone flights were conducted on Jan. 10, took place in Class B airspace, captured more than “700 nadir and oblique images,” and covered more than 40 acres of land, 3DR says. 3DR’s cloud then automatically processed the imagery into 3D point clouds and 2D orthomosaics.
“The models will be used by Atkins to plan the demolition process and organize the operations during construction so to minimize the negative effects on the airport’s daily activities,” the company’s article explains. “In addition, the 3D point clouds will be used to work on the preliminary design phase together with the architects.”
The complete coverage from 3DR can be found here.
