Drone Technology in Architecture, Engineering and Construction

CHAPTER 5Getting Started

This chapter is a road map for implementation. It reviews basic drone features, gear, and flight apps. Included are important skills, understanding hardware, and a review of specific software. These are all qualities required for a well-rounded drone program.

This chapter will review the following:

1. What you need to know about drones (hardware) and how to select a drone.
2. Related computer devices, including tablets, smart devices, laptops, and desktops and how they impact workflow.
3. A detailed review of drone software, what they do, when to use them, and recommendations.
4. A quick review of hardware related to processing drone data like photogrammetry.

AEC Drone Standard Features

There are many drones available on the market. However, drones are not created equal, each one varying in strengths and weaknesses. The authors both use and recommend the DJI Phantom Series and Mavic Pro Series drones by DJI as affordable and capable platforms. At the time of writing, this means the Phantom 4 Pro V2 or the Mavic 2 Pro. To step up from the Phantom/Mavics would mean either the DJI Inspire 2 or the DJI Matrice 200/210 or 600 series (Figure 5.1). All of these are excellent flyers, capture high quality data, are intelligent, and include lots of supporting features and apps, and decent consumer support. Regardless of which drones are available, DJI is still the authors' preferred drone manufacturer for AEC work.

Fig. 5-1: DJI Phantom 4 Pro (a), Mavic 2 Pro (b), ...