Natural Power has joined the drone age with commercial deployment of a Trimble UX5 to carry out surveys in Scotland.
The consultancy said the initiative using the “latest aerial imaging surveyor” is part of efforts to stay ahead of the technological curve.
Senior geotechnical engineer Gavin Germaine said: “Deploying teams on foot to collect this data is time consuming and can therefore impact upon budgets and programme, while precision can be limited by the low density of data collection and multiple re-deployments may be required to meet the requirements of an iterative design process.
“Our new drone equipment enables full site coverage to be achieved in a very short time, thus reducing costs, impact and exposure of personnel to the hazards of the natural working environment.”
Over the course of a single day, full coverage of a five square kilometre project site was achieved. A variety of data streams were acquired including high-resolution aerial imagery and high accuracy 3D topographic data.
Natural Power said data will be integrated with traditional ground-based surveys, further augmenting land based GPS survey capability.
Image: the drone ready for take off (Natural Power)
