EA - InView Assets

Introductory pilot data capture of your asset

EA

The Environment Agency (EA) makes complex coastal management decisions. We work with them as part of the Lower Otter Restoration Project to establish precise topographic data from drone surveys to help plan and understand the impacts of managed retreat in this stretch of coast.

About The Environment Agency

Environment Agency is responsible for flood management, regulating land and water pollution, and conservation

The Environment Agency is a government body (part of DEFRA) that helps people and wildlife adapt to climate change and reduce its impacts, including flooding, drought, sea level rise and coastal erosion. The EA has around 10,600 employees and is based in Bristol, but organised on a regional basis.

Their Challenge

Validating drone data as a reliable alternative to lidar and terrestrial-based capture methods

Ground-based and lidar-flown GNSS GPS survey data has always been held up as the “gold standard” – yet it is costly and can quickly become out of date. Drone data, with its low-cost and quick turnaround times needed to show quality comparability when used in critical applications such as coastal flood-risk management. In this project, we needed to show sub 20mm accuracy in our level of output precision.

Outcomes

Cost-saving, safety and efficiency benefits

Hours/days capture time*

Versus the traditional ground/roof-based data capture time of weeks or even months for large assets, saving days/weeks

De-risking data capture

Versus ground or roof top inspections with ropes, scaffold and towers our aerial capture tools are “zero-touch”

Up to 80% cost saving

Versus traditional manual inspection costs by removing the expense of prolonged capture time, travel time and repeated in-person site visits

Fully digital remote inspection

Versus the traditional survey which does not “see” all of the asset from all aspects and elevations

Millions of data points

Versus ground/roof-based surveys with limited access and finite resolution, allowing pinpoint accuracy across the whole digital twin

3D interactive outputs

Versus the traditional 2D paper-based reports and images which have limited access, coverage and quality

*For areas up to 10,000 or 1ha – roof inspection image capture in one day. Larger areas of up to 100ha are for landscape photogrammetry in one day.

Getting highly accurate topographic drone data

High-quality mapping takes careful planning, experience and the correct enterprise-level technology. For this our team used a Phantom 4 pro with a very accurate GPS sensor. We combined this with ground control points using the Emlid RS2 GNSS GPS. We worked with the EA to abstract our drone data to compare with established data. Results showed variations between 45mm to <10mm which was consistent with expectations given the flight altitude. Overall, this pilot project demonstrated comparability was possible – quicker, cheaper and safer.

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