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Will your architecture firm buy a drone?

Doing measures of existing conditions in Minnesota usually meant one of two things: a hot summer day with no air conditioning, or sub-zero temperatures and snow. Plus if the site was outside the Twin Cities (Minnesotans love their cabins): a couple hours of driving and a marathon session trying to get everything in before dark. Crawling around buildings with a tape measure, a pad of paper, and a bunch of pens is not my idea of a great day. I really hate measuring existing conditions. Which of course means I will now share with you:

My three favorite measuring stories*

While at SALA Architects, I once measured a nice modernist house that Eric Odor and I were going to redesign. I had the house to myself and it was a pleasant late summer day (August 24th, 2009; I know the date because photos have a date and time stamp). I brought my laptop and blasted my music throughout the house. Eight hours of measuring while listening to Metal is the way to do it. I guess now with a smart phone, I’d just listen to music off of my phone. I’ll have to remember that. Music makes working better. Fortunately one can listen to music and take photos on a phone at the same time. The right technology definitely makes documenting existing conditions more enjoyable.

A few years earlier I did a much different solo measure. This time it was the dead of winter. The temperature was closer to 0° F than 32° F. I had to climb through piles of snow and onto a roof that would eventually become a beautiful deck. I documented about 90% of the interior and then went outside to do the exteriors before I lost the light (which goes quickly in Minnesota at that time of the year). I took all my measurements and photos. I then rushed to the door between the garage and house to get back inside and warm up. But the door didn’t budge. It was locked. Fortunately I had my keys so I could run to my car for safety (yeah the temperatures were low enough to easily cause harm). The rest of the day went like this: frantic phone calls to the home owners, shame back at the office, a fortunate return to the house where I completed the measurements as the clients got ready to go out to dinner. Not cool. Not fun.

A few weeks before the fun empty house, I did one other measure in the Twin Cities with SALA Architects’ student intern. The frustration from missing and poorly collected data that was the intern’s responsibility to measure was the reason why the second measure that month was solo (yes I should have looked over her work, but after hours and hours of measuring I was a bit tired… and trusting). I can’t really blame the intern from missing what she did. Our clients weren’t technically hoarders. But… I’ll put it this way: you’ll never see professional photographs of this project or visit it on a home tour. Which is a shame because the clients were awesome and the project turned out really well (though sadly the last time I saw the project was when it was about 90% completely; I don’t know why I never went back). Anyways, I digress. The point is that we couldn’t reach all the corners of the home to measure everything we wanted. We had to climb over furniture and piles of stuff, move things, and clear paths for the laser of the electronic measuring tape. It was not ideal or exact. Fortunately we had enough pictures and I was able to piece together everything nicely in the ArchiCAD model. Mostly. I feel like there was one or two walls that seemed unreasonably thin. But hey, weird old houses have some ridiculous conditions.

A Better Way

MQ-1_Predator_unmanned_aircraft_narrowFortunately the interns and young architects of the future won’t have to deal with all that. Already laser scanning to create point clouds of existing conditions is becoming a normal thing to do for large, complex projects with large budgets. I can’t even imagine having to do existing conditions on some of the mammoth revitalization projects out there. And of course as those technologies get cheaper, they will migrate to smaller scale work. Which is great. Getting those point clouds into your BIM is a whole cluster of issues, but that’s for someone else to write about. On smaller scale projects digital cameras, electronic tape measures, and iPad apps are making life easier. (blatant plug: if you’re reading this before September 2nd, 2013, you can win a free copy of Orthograph Architect by going here. If it’s after that date, you should still go read that post as I discuss the switch from film to digital cameras when doing site measures). I’ve yet to try it but I always wanted to just record a video of a house I was measuring instead of taking still photos. That way I could pause the video to look at all the minor conditions I missed when only taking 4 or 6 or 8 photos of a room. That’d be sweet. And I could narrate the video as well, adding another layer of documentation.

The Drones are Coming

What if we combined all the existing tech-laser scanning, digital photography, mobile apps that build BIM as builts-and put it on a drone. It’d be a small drone, like a hummingbird. It’d be able to hover. It’d have cameras. It’d be able to get into all those little spots we couldn’t. Crawl spaces, cabinets, chimneys, attics, etc. It’d be able to fly up and measure, photograph, and document roofs and crickets. It could give you heights of trees. It’d have GPS so it could survey and pinpoint all the site conditions. How long would that take a drone to do? An hour? Two?

One of two things will happen. And by one of two things, I mean one thing, but I’ll say the other as well. Architects will jump on this idea and offer this service. Forward thinking architecture firms will buy a drone. Maybe one or two architects in a local will buy the drones and rent them out to other architects. Or perhaps just do the documentation for them. Or instead of architects buying drones, some other type of company-contractors, surveyors, engineers-will buy them and offer all sorts of as built, verification, and documentation services. It’ll be a great offering, and a big step into the 21st century for the AEC industry.

*the house I measured where the home owner made us a three course home cooked Indian lunch was pretty awesome too, if I ignore that it was a 15+ hour day with 6 hours of driving. Subscribe to my blog to read more about the tricky world of being an Architect in the 21st century: Shoegnome on FacebookTwitter, and RSS feed.

Comments

  • August 20, 2013
    reply

    Would love to hear architecture firms’ feedback on this. We’ve invested in AR.drones and would like to integrate them into the curriculum in a manner that would best serve the industry. We’re about to implement a basic AR.drone module where students use drones to capture aerial photo and video of a site as part of an overall site analysis project, and are considering the drones’ applications for computational fabrication when paired with basic Arduino-based effectors (e.g. grippers for masonry stacking).

      • August 20, 2013
        reply

        Yes of course. I’ll report back later in the semester!

  • August 20, 2013
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    Brian… sound’s like a great course.

    I keep looking for the project where I can take one of my son’s AR.Drones out in the field to at least get overhead photography… if I can ever learn to fly them like they should be flown!

    Somewhere in the literature a while back, one of the developers for the AR.Drones created tools to capture 3D model info, but I got sidetracked and never had a chance to take it for a spin to see if it worked. Maybe Brian’s students can track it down and give it a whirl. It would be worth knowing about, since the technology is there to use the tool… if we can get over the figure-out-how hurdle.

    Jared… keep ’em thinking!

  • August 21, 2013
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    Surveying via drones is not just for architecture. After the recent devastating floods in the Himalayas, this is how a group called Social Drones started helping out with relief work.

    http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/20/indian-startup-uses-drones-to-drop-aid-in-flood-ravaged-areas/

  • August 21, 2013
    reply

    The only issue with a drone is that you aren’t aware of what they are measuring so you are trusting that when you get back to the desk you have a coherent model. But that is the case with any measuring system you employ. I have found myself many of nights looking at my own writing and measurements and saying what is that or I missed this one critical measurement. I’m sure the case can be made for other systems. There are these two backpack systems that look promising but also not the sexiest. One is from Cal Berkeley, and the other by MIT.

    So the technology is coming closer to being able to do this.

    But it would be amazing to throw a AR drone into the air or an autonomous RC car into a room and let it run around measuring and pushing that data back to your BIM Server whilst your team starts to verify and begin the completion of the existing condition drawings (as-built’s).

    On a side note I am in the process of launching a startup that is going to blow your minds which deals with this issue and much more. I just started knocking on doors looking for some investors, literally last week. Not to sway to far from the context of this post but I could use some experts to review the viability of the concept, and not to mention a few angel investors.

  • August 22, 2013
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    I’ve thought a lot about this idea over the years. UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. I hate the term drones and all the negativity it brings to my mind) have been a round for awhile now. I’ve mulled over what would be involved in starting a contracting business doing aerial inspections of roofs, bridges, towers etc. along with aerial photography and videography. Add to that photogrametry and laser scanning and there is plenty of work to scrabble for. Last time I checked though (and it was months ago, not years) the FAA wasn’t approving UAVs for commercial uses. I think there has been only one exemption or license issued to date. It’s coming I imagine and I think it will open up a lot of creative opportunities.

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