Drone Inspection & Monitoring for Construction, Industry & Infrastructure BVLOS

It's vitally important we keep our infrastructure, construction & industrial sites running. In 2018 construction provided 3m jobs and contributed £250 billion to the UK economy or 15% of UK GDP. More broadly, engineering enterprises employed 19% of the UK labour force and generated 23% of the UK's turnover.

Against a backdrop of skills shortages costing UK businesses £1.7bn / year, the COVID-19 pandemic is making a bad situation worse - with additional labour shortages; reduced workforce efficiency; and planners unsure who will show up for work.

This pandemic may continue for many more months, perhaps even years. As such, we urgently need to accelerate remote inspection and monitoring. This project aims to address this need.

Conventional drone services are delivered under visual line of sight (VLOS) regulations. Scaling these services requires building a large team of drone pilots and managing their travel to/from mission sites. This approach is resource constrained, inconsistent and expensive - and as a result is very difficult to scale.

In contrast, sees.ai's solution teams pilots in remote control rooms with highly-automated drones on the client site, to enable the remote execution of complex missions BVLOS. This concentration of resources in a control room significantly improves scalability (zero travel means fewer pilots required) and introduces economies of scale, scope and learning which result in improved quality, capability and cost.

In the context of COVID-19 this project will help us return to normal operation, safety levels and quality control, as follows:

1\. By accelerating remote inspection & monitoring, this solution will reduce the number of site workers involved, freeing them for productive work.

2\. By providing office workers with better information at their desks, this solution will help them optimise build and maintenance work without needing to visit site.

3\. By reducing the number of people visiting site, this solution will help operators reduce infection risk which could potentially lead to site shutdown.

Beyond COVID-19 the sees.ai solution represents the state-of-the-art in a long-term trend towards enabling remote inspection and monitoring - linked to the evolution of BIM, reality capture and the digital twin.

Project partners include some of the UK's biggest users of drones today and some of the companies most likely to benefit from drones in the future. These companies see the value in aerial intelligence and see the sees.ai solution as a potential way to access it at the scale and quality required.