Experience lightning-fast data collection with Dynamic Data Solutions

Commercial drone services offer businesses cost savings, access to specialized expertise, enhanced safety, flexibility, and rapid deployment, making them a valuable tool for various industries 

 The sheer mobility, flexibility, and variability of drones means they can produce valuable datasets in a huge variety of applications and use-cases across virtually every industry that conducts surveys, inspections, and more.

Drones help farmers, growers, and ranchers to reduce costs, increase yields, and better manage both crops and livestock through collecting data about crop and soil conditions, water levels, plant health, and more.

Inspecting cell phone towers is a necessary but time- and labor-intensive process that can also put human workers at risk. Drones can collect data in a fraction of the time with no danger to human operators.

Drones can provide thermal data as well as RGB data and aerial imagery to determine how solar panels are working, verify overall condition, assess environmental impact, and check on any right-of-way encroachments.

Drones provide almost any kind of survey and monitoring data for use in site planning, progress monitoring, safety inspections, and even thermal imaging to detect problems like electrical hotspots or heat loss.

From helping in search-and-rescue operations through aerial imaging, thermal imaging, providing surveillance for law enforcement, and more, drones can speed up and ease emergency response.

Prevent plant shutdowns, reduce operational delays, pinpoint structural weaknesses, assess performance, and speed up inspections, maintenance, and other functions by using drones to gather real-time imaging data.

Not only is ground level photography time-consuming and labor-intensive, but it can also miss features aerial drones can capture. Drones thus facilitate property inspections, appraisals, management, and more.

Beyond data, the primary purpose and strength of a drone is to make projects more efficient and cost-effective. These efficiencies are also key to opening up new data collection possibilities. Drones’ flexibility isn’t just about what they can achieve on a technical level. They can also make projects logistically feasible that would otherwise be too time-consuming, labor-intensive, or costly to undertake.

Drones collect more data faster by capturing more visuals per second than human operators can typically capture in a minute. They can also collect multiple types of data at once and, in some applications, collect data on different parcels of land simultaneously (especially from higher altitudes). For example, drone video can reduce golf course treatment time by 96% due to faster detection of issues like fungal outbreaks and water leaks, both of which can be hard to spot at ground level.iii Similarly, it might take a technician around 25 hours to inspect 1MW of solar on foot. A small 5MW solar farm would thus take 125 manhours to inspect what could be completed in a few hours by drone.

The labor reduction in some applications can be massive. If you don’t have to send a worker (or a team of workers, or multiple teams) to manually collect data across a vast parcel of land (or up a tall height like a cell phone tower), you can reduce overall labor required by 50% to 80%.

Photogrammetry and LIDAR thus both serve as a way to acquire needed data at a quicker pace with reduced crews or in a way that supplements the crew that they have internally.

Both time and labor savings translate directly into cost efficiencies, and across the board, drone data collection is less expensive than its manual alternatives. Power Engineering reports that a series of trials found that drones were 40% less expensive than manual solar inspections.iv Similarly, The New York Power Authority, in partnership with Ontario Power Generation, used drones to inspect an ice boom between Niagara River and Lake Eerie. In just 20 minutes, the drone found a damaged cable. Their team estimates that drones saved fully 90% of the cost of inspections.

Many surveys, inspections, and other data collection functions require workers to place themselves in hazardous conditions. Searching for a methane leak could leave the worker exposed to dangerous chemicals; inspecting a cell phone tower would require the worker to face the risk of falling from a height; conducting railway inspections that require people to traverse tracks potentially puts them in harm’s way; etc. Drones remove the need to place people in potentially risky situations; and the drones themselves typically stay out of the way of moving equipment and vehicles.