UAV Stakes Out New Ground
A flying/staking robot has taken a huge step forward in automation for site layout, including road, rail, utilities, and energy applications.
Working the traditional way, how many surveyor-days would it take to mark the 300,000 points needed to lay out a solar farm? How many to stake out 100 miles of access roads on a wind farm project?
Tom Yeshurun and Liav Muller, two young Israeli civil engineers with several years of field experience, knew that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offered a better way.
“We were amazed at how inefficient a lot of the things were at construction sites,” Yeshurun recalls. “At a port construction site we visited in Costa Rica, they had 19 surveying crews working for three and a half years. Sixteen of them were working with GPS for stakeout.”
Muller and Yeshurun, who had used UAVs to capture aerial imagery for monitoring, mapping, and creating 3D models, realized that they could be used for more than that. So, they left their jobs, co-founded the company Civdrone, applied for a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority, and raised venture capital.