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There are few construction jobs more dangerous than the erection of a high rise. In addition to the risks typically encountered at a construction site – ladders, falling debris, electrical shocks, and heavy machinery – workers must potentially operate hundreds or even thousands of feet above ground level, often with precious few regulations or safeguards in place to prevent a fall. So significant is the danger that, in March, the Ontario government released new mandatory training standards for high rise workers.
“We’ve decided at the Ministry of Labor that a standard needs to be set and that all people working on this equipment should have proper training, otherwise they can’t work in the province of Ontario,” said Labor Minister Kevin Flynn. “We don’t want to see any more incidents like we saw last Friday.”
The event Flynn refers to involved two workers who fell to their deaths when a building’s scaffolding collapsed beneath them. There have been many such incidents in the construction field, the majority of which end in death.
“Falls from heights continue to be a leading cause of injuries and fatalities in all sectors, especially construction,” Ontario Chief Prevention Officer George Gritziotis explained to GTA Construction Report. “Terrible tragedies like [these] underline the need for all of use to increase our vigilance in preventing these kinds of incidents from happening.”
The problem is that regulations can only go so far. People get tired. They make mistakes. They cut corners and ignore the rules in order to finish their work more quickly. And in high rise development, such mistakes too often have fatal consequences.
Because no matter how many regulations you put in place; no matter how much mandatory training you implement, the fact remains that people cannot fly.
But drones can. And many high rise developers, already enchanted by their value, are now flirting with another idea. What if, instead of putting human lives at risks, drones could be made directly responsible for building construction?
Currently, the primary role of UAVs in high rise development is logistical –and they’ve made great strides in that regard. Already, this enhanced visibility has been used to improve the safety of workers through better communication coupled with UAV-aided jobsite inspections. According to Skycatch founder and CEO Christian Sanz, this barely even scratches the surface.
Skycatch provides construction firms with a comprehensive, three-dimensional map of construction sites, captured through a fleet of custom-made drones. These maps can be modified through an interactive dashboard, identifying problem points and providing greater visibility into all facets of a project. This, in turn, allows firms to speed up their construction process significantly, saving a great deal of money in the process. Sanz, however, feels that drones are capable of much, much more – and he’s not alone.
“We’re working with machine-makers to develop technology that gives aerial data back to other machines,” Sanz told Fortune. “Automating other machines using drone data? That’s the thing that’s going to blow people’s minds.”
Automation aside, there’s the very real possibility that, in the near future, we might see aerial drones working in tandem with human employees on high-rise projects – or even replacing them altogether. In order for this to happen, however, they must first surmount certain challenges. Chief among these is weight.
“Unlike cranes, drones have the ability to reach any point in space,” Dynamic Systems and Control researcher Federico Augugliaro said, speaking to Gizmag. “To have drones work close to humans on a construction site, however, their size has to be kept rather small. This limits the amount of payload they can carry and the amount of construction material they can move around.”
"Aerial robots are generic and can be equipped with different tools to transport and manipulate material in different ways, but a key subject hereby is weight," added Ammar Mirjan, a researcher at the Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication. "This motivates the investigation into lightweight construction systems. We are particularly interested in the fabrication of tensile structures such as cable-net structures and three-dimensional suspension structures that could not be built with other fabrications methods."
Video courtesy of The Sky Guys
There’s also the matter of how automated drones will interact with their flesh-and-blood counterparts. In order to avoid creating chaos and causing accidents, these drones must interact more closely with humans. Much like the robots we’ve seen entering the workplace in other industries; high rise drones will need advanced positional awareness and problem-solving capabilities to be equipped with advanced positional awareness and problem-solving capabilities.
In other words, they’ll need to be intelligent.
“To interact smoothly with people, robots need social intelligence,” reads a 2013 edition of The Economist’s Technology Quarterly publication. He notes that human traits like the use of metaphors, harmless mistakes, and simply acknowledgement can go a long way towards helping human workers accept their robotic comrades.
“It will probably be a decade or two at least before robots will be nimble and intelligent enough to [truly enter the workplace],” the piece admits. “They will need far better sensors, movement-control actuators and batteries, and much smarter software.”
These are all advances that will be developed in time.
“Christian’s always had some really interesting ideas about the potential of drone technology, and I really believe he’s on to something here. Right now, drones are mostly used for planning and marketing,” said Sky Guys CEO Adam Sax, “but as Sanz has maintained on multiple occasions, they’ve the potential to do a great deal more.”
Sax’s company, an aerial photography firm specialized in high-rise condominium development, maintains a close strategic partnership with Skycatch, making use of both The Sky Guys drones and SkyCatch’s proprietary processing application.
“Once we solve issues such as weight and automation – and we will – I expect we’re going to see a huge shift in the construction industry,” Sax added. “The end result of that change will be a safer environment for everyone who works there.”
Better training programs and more comprehensive safety standards are still going to be important, of course – they always will. Even so, these measures can only go so far to prevent accidents and protect workers. Drone technology, though still in its infancy, can fill in the safety gaps left by this regulation, mitigating the risks of the workplace in a way that regulation never can.
