Dull, dirty and dangerous jobs. But someone has to do them.

3 reasons why some professions can no longer do without drones.

2013 saw a boom of conferences and workshops in technical institutes and in engineering and architecture faculties on the use of drones for professional purposes, with hopes for swift regulation of civil uses. From Ferrara to Palermo, to the hubs of Milan and Turin, universities and professional associations of engineers and architects have worked together to discover and share the new frontiers of geomatics offered by quadcopters and hexacopters. The reasons for this enthusiasm are easy to identify:

1 - Dull, dirty, dangerous.

From their controversial military heritage, drones for civil or professional use also inherit the thankless but extremely useful task of carrying out, at favourable costs (in money and time), jobs defined as dull, dirty, dangerous, linked to the fields of architecture and engineering. Among these jobs, as professionals well know, are surveys for the management and protection of land layout, infrastructure and building activities, all very important tasks, by no means foolish but thankless because they are very inconvenient and sometimes dangerous for surveyors, geologists, municipal technical offices, construction and restoration companies, as well as regional and forestry agencies.

2 - Small and affordable.

In a delicate period not only for the economy in general but for the construction sector in particular, cutting costs and working times goes hand in hand with the need to offer competitive, high-tech, high-quality services. For this reason it is no longer possible to ignore or underestimate the usefulness of a tool that makes it possible to carry out, with millimetre precision, surveys that demand effort not only financially, but also in terms of time and physical labour.
An interesting example and experiment was carried out in the municipality of Salemi:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmodqOmv2k&feature=youtu.be

3 - Development of useful applications not only for technicians

This video documents the work of 20 surveyors who systematically surveyed, using a drone, 106 properties in the historic centre of the town, struck by the 1968 earthquake, ultimately creating a WebGIS. It is a very useful tool for carrying out analyses and for consultation by anyone who needs to work on the properties in this area: from the Municipal Technical Office to a prospective buyer of a house or a plot, from the design engineer in charge of the restoration project to the company that has to carry out the restoration work.

And you, do you know a surveyor or an engineer grappling with a drone? Will you tell us about their experience?

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