Atkins looking at drones to carry out quantity surveying valuations
CIO and CDO Richard Cross explains that the firm is looking at using drones to improve survey efficiency on large-scale projects
Design, engineering and project management consultancy Atkins is looking at using drones to carry out quantity surveying valuations, its CIO and CDO Richard Cross exclusively revealed to Computing today.
Cross said that at the moment, quantity surveyors go on to a site with a piece of paper and pen and note down what they can see, but he suggested that for larger-scale projects, drones could be used instead to improve efficiency.
"You can imagine on a big site or on a road we can fly a drone over it and scan the area, and in a few seconds you can get a picture of everything on the site," he said.
"If you flew a drone over a site every day you could see what has changed, what has been done, what hasn't been done, what has been completed and those sorts of things - so it would be a tool to improve efficiency and get people focused on more value-added activities such as design," he added.
The idea is still in its early stages but Atkins is already considering its options as to the right combination of internal programmes and the use of technologies from external providers.
It is one of several initiatives the company is working on. The firm is part of a consortium that is testing with driverless cars. It hopes to put the BAE Systems Wildcat autonomous vehicle through its paces on private and public roads at the beginning of 2016.
It has also signed a deal with soon-to-be acquired EE to use anonymised data from mobile devices to see how the general public travels around facilities.
"It captures where people are going, and can help us build predictive models and apply them to things that we are familiar with such as transport and infrastructure," Cross explained.
Atkins isn't the only firm looking at using drones to replace tasks usually carried out by employees; pest control firm Rentokil Initial's global director of enterprise, Anthony Meadows, told delegates at Computing's Enterprise Mobility Summit 2015 that the company was looking into using drones for bird pest control.
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