Autopilot drone in construction: A proof of concept for handling lightweight instruments and materials

Abstract

Applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in construction have been increased in recent years mainly for purposes of automatically collecting field data. In the market, there is a growing opportunity for using UAVs in material handling. On the other side, vertical transportation in construction sites is a crucial challenge that leads to a drop in productivity efficiency. This paper presents a proof of concept for automating the lifting procedure of lightweight instruments and materials in construction sites. To do so, a platform is developed that could automatically manage material/instrument handling requests via an autopilot drone. The aircraft position is tracked with an onboard GPS module which is not accurate in urban areas. So inaccurate GPS signals could deviate the drone from the predefined path. To tackle this problem, a machine vision algorithm is utilized to calibrate the real-time position of the aircraft. A self-supervised learning algorithm is integrated into the system to handling collision avoidance during the flight. Finally, the developed methods are tested with an UAV in a real world environment to demonstrate the potentials of hiring autopilot drones in construction.

Keywords

• Drone
• UAV
• Autopilot
• GPS calibration