The current method of monitoring the construction process and delivering information involved a lot of manpower and needed to be done on a regular basis. This also sometimes involved disrupting operations for days on the end, thereby decreasing productivity and increasing time and cost overruns. The information produced was therefore unreliable and did not reflect ground reality or provide information about how topography affects unfinished movement or stockpile distribution.
A global promoter of sustainable mobility in association with Skylark Drones conducted a project to digitize and monitor the construction of the 1,800 km Eastern Dedicated Freight Railway Corridor (EDFC) to save project time and gain insights into the planning and management process.
The key deliverables were:
- The customer needed a faster, more efficient way of surveying of a sector.
- The customer needed a faster, more efficient way of video graphing.
- The customer needed a secure and reliable medium via which the data collected can be made available.
This project provided our contractors useful insights in pacing up the execution process in:
1) Inspection Issues
2) Compliance Issues
The key takeaways are as follows
- On field planning exercise time reduced by 600 times.
- The number of useable data points increased by 20 times.
Furthermore, in projects of such scale, upper management is generally shielded from the actual groundwork. As multiple personnel were involved in the project, an error or delay at a single stage could have had repercussions in the entire project.
How Drones helped
Topographical survey for geospatial utilization and videography are sectors where Skylark sought to be involved in by providing high-resolution orthomosaic maps and videos. These outputs were further used to provide additional and valuable insights about the size, distribution, nature of key natural and man-made features with a high level of detail and accuracy using our unique web solution platform.
The company had provided Drone Data services in the form of Video feeds for project progress management and stakeholder management Drone data helped the contractors to monitor the progress on a regular basis and allocate resources in a more structured way thus saving both time and cutting losses. The key success criteria for Skylark Drones’ engagement in this project were to meet the following top priorities of the customer:
- Provide better accuracy in terms of information captured in the survey maps
- Make available high-quality video data
- Quick turn-around time for surveying
- Make use of significantly less manpower, thereby saving costs for the customer
- Be a cost-effective solution
- Provide a web solution platform that allows the customer to use the data in a convenient manner
Drone feeds were being utilized by the stakeholders working towards the below-mentioned assets.
1) By Contractor for electrical processes and track electrification
- Track Length under construction
- Station Buildings
- TSS: Traction Power Supply Stations
- SSP: Subsection and Paralleling Stations
- SP: Sectioning Posts
2) By Contractor for civil processes
- First Stage – Land Acquisition
- Second Stage - Embankments
- Third Stage - Track Laying