Hammers and drills have long been tools of choice on construction sites. But increasingly, drones are joining them. Small unmanned quadcopters equipped with high-resolution video cameras are relatively cheap to buy, easy to use and produce high-quality images at a fraction of the cost of traditional aerial photography. As a result, their video images are being used to support marketing and head off future legal and technical issues. In the San Fernando Valley region, Lundgren Management Corp., a Valencia construction management and general contractor of schools, has been flying drones regularly for about a year over its building sites to back up its progress reports to school boards, said Shawn Fonder, vice president of program and client services. “Pictures speak a thousand words – and how powerful is it to do a flyover of a brand-new campus versus speaking in front of a board?” Fonder said. Drones are not just for PR, however. Camera footage creates a permanent record of construction details. “It was originally purchased as a marketing tool and now it’s being implemented at four to five projects, doing flyovers on a regular basis to have that footage on record,” Fonder said. Drone programs such as Lundgren’s come with complications. It’s a learning curve to fly them – and they can crash. Plus, the laws and restrictions around registering and piloting them are confusing and have caused some industry pullback. Sky tools Lundgren uses high-tech imagery both in the air and on the ground. While its drones fly over construction sites, the company also hires an outside firm with high-resolution cameras embedded at spots within the buildings to take close-up photos and document the construction process. The images provided by Multivista Systems of Phoenix show how and where critical systems – electrical, utility, gas and water lines – are installed behind walls, under floors and above ceilings. The photos are sent to maintenance and facility personnel so they can refer to them as a guide should there be, say, a need to repair a gas line after the building is constructed to avoid exploratory digging or destruction. On-ground cameras also provide site security, quality assurance and quality control – factors that are typically inspected by a team, Fonder said. The photography provides another set of eyes. “It’s a good mechanism to find contractor shortcuts and it increases the quality of inspection teams because they know there’s a camera shooting,” Fonder said. “I think it puts everyone on their toes.” In San Fernando, commercial contractor Bernards uses drone video during preconstruction at its sites to help plan for development. The company’s tech team scans key spots on video images from the drone to create a mass of points that then form a three-dimensional cloud, or model, of the site, which shows the varying contours of the ground, said Darren Roos, director of building information modeling and virtual design. “In the past, we used to go to Google Search and look at the satellite view to see surrounding objects (at the site), but they were in 2-D,” Roos said. “With the point cloud, we can look at future job sites in 3-D to figure out where the crane goes so as to not obstruct something, and where to best put security cameras, and where the best spot is to put exits and emergency lanes.” Drones also offer the ability to fly the same programmed flight path – a valuable tool, companies said. Video from flights at regular intervals at the same time of day can be edited together into a time-lapse sequence to show the progress of construction. What’s making use of drones so widespread now among construction companies and developers is their accessibility. They are easy to find and so easy to use that both companies have employees on staff who fly the drones as a hobby. They’re relatively cheap, too. Roos said Bernards’ drone cost about $2,000 while Lundgren spent about $700. Although drones tend to crash often and need to be replaced, they’re still cheaper than the $300 to $500 an hour or more to get photos or video from airplanes or helicopters. Plus, images from planes can take days to get back. “We’ve found them to be very cost-effective, cost-efficient, and the turnaround time is phenomenal,” said Steve Churm, chief communications officer for FivePoint Communities in Aliso Viejo, the co-developer with Newhall Land & Farming Co. in Valencia on the massive proposed Newhall Ranch community in the Santa Clarita Valley. Churm said with planes, it used to take weeks to get flyover images, but today his company’s drone can survey a site and provide images in 36 hours. “We grab the drone and drive it in the back of a pickup truck with the operator and within a matter of hours we are looking at a survey of large swaths of land,” Churm said. FivePoint has another active site in Irvine, the 4,700-acre former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro that the developer and the city are turning into a residential and commercial community. It uses a drone to survey and track the progress of site-grading work and to see whether the grading is in line with the plans, regulations and guidelines it has to hit based on its entitlement, Churm said. “The imagery helps keep us accountable,” he added. Back in Santa Clarita, a drone used by Steve Valenziano and JSB Development Inc. of Valencia has been flying over their joint project, the planned 180-acre-plus Vista Canyon development. At least twice a week, the drone zooms into specific work areas to check the grading, storm drain installations and embankment protection along the Santa Clarita River and records video with a time stamp on it. Valenziano uses the time stamp to download specific shots as stills that he sends to investors and lenders to show the progress, he said. “If we were to have commissioned aerial photos, it would have been many thousands of dollars,” said Valenziano. “But we’ve spent nothing for hundreds and hundreds of images.” DIY drones Flying and operating a drone has a learning curve. In fact, some of the companies interviewed for this story conceded they’ve sustained crashes, though the final results are worth the headaches. Also, Lundgren’s Fonder has issues with the drones’ short battery lives that allow them barely a half-hour of flying time. And then there are the tricky legal and regulatory issues, whether local or federal, that companies must navigate. Jocelyn Topolski, executive director of project development for Bernards, said there’s been confusion within the industry on the laws and regulations surrounding drone usage and some firms have been daunted by the restrictions. There are altitude and distance limitations, privacy issues, registration procedures and other limits on where and when drones can be flown. “We’re trying to figure out the law, and the legal implications and a lot (of companies) are trying to hit the brakes to see how that goes,” Topolski said. “A lot of the restrictions are pretty big. How do you guarantee you’re not going to fly over a person in downtown Los Angeles?” Beyond that, there’s the long-term worry, in this litigious society, that any data that a company collects and stores today can be used against it later. But that hasn’t dampened drones’ burgeoning popularity in the construction industry. Last year, San Rafael’s AutoDesk Inc. bought SkyCatch Inc. of San Francisco, a drone maker that focuses on construction clients. And to many users, the hurdles are well worth it. Lundgren is using its drone to fly over the site of its next project, a new science building for College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita. “People like to see it – school boards like to see technology, and use it and see it being used on their projects,” he said. “I think so many people are doing it, it’s almost expected.”
