Drones fly into engineering — and Burns & McDonnell saves time and money
Drones have flown out of the sci-fi movies and war zones into American business, and the area’s largest engineering firms are putting them to use in risky and forbidding settings.
On Wednesday, Burns & McDonnell showed off a DJI Inspire 1, one of the growing fleet of drones that it uses to scout project sites and to inspect and monitor infrastructure during and after construction.
The demonstration also included aerial photos from a big power line project recently completed by Burns & McDonnell, the first engineering firm in the area to get U.S. and Canadian approval for commercial drone use.
Steven Santovasi, the firm’s manager of geospatial services, said the firm used drones — also referred to as UAVs, for unmanned aerial vehicles — “when installing more than 200 miles of transmission lines in Canada through extremely rugged terrain and brutally cold temperatures.”
“In the past, engineers would have to physically walk the route to gather those precise measurements and data,” Santovasi said. “Using UAVs allowed us to do our job safer, more efficiently and significantly faster, saving our client time and money.”
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