Skyports Drone Services brings automated BVLOS aerial surveying to German construction leader HOCHTIEF, piloted from Spain

Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices has part­nered with HOCHTIEF to pro­vide auto­mat­ed BVLOS ‘drone-in-a-box’ aer­i­al sur­vey­ing of the Rhein­brücke Lev­erkusen bridge con­struc­tion site, which is locat­ed north of Cologne on the Riv­er Rhein in Ger­many.

In an inno­v­a­tive addi­tion to the deploy­ment, Sky­ports is over­see­ing its drone mis­sions from its Remote Oper­a­tion Cen­tre (ROC) in Madrid, Spain, remov­ing the need for on-site pilots and pro­vid­ing sig­nif­i­cant flex­i­bil­i­ty and effi­cien­cies.

For the deploy­ment Sky­ports has installed a fixed “drone-in-a-box” sys­tem at the con­struc­tion site. Con­duct­ing week­ly auto­mat­ed BVLOS drone sur­veys, the sur­vey data col­lect­ed helps HOCHTIEF to build a lay­ered pic­ture of how the build is pro­gress­ing week on week.

The bridge is cur­rent­ly under con­struc­tion and is expect­ed to be com­plet­ed by 2028, requir­ing exten­sive earth­works, the removal of the old bridge, and new con­struc­tion on both the east and west banks.

Alex Brown, CEO, Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices, said: “Large infra­struc­ture projects are incred­i­bly intri­cate and com­plex, with con­struc­tion com­pa­nies under pres­sure to deliv­er on time and on bud­get.

“With auto­mat­ed “drone-in-a-box” sur­veys like this we’re pro­vid­ing alter­nate per­spec­tives and deep lev­el data insights that can improve resource plan­ning and catch any poten­tial issues ear­ly, help­ing keep projects on track. Pilot­ing the drone remote­ly also means we are cre­at­ing oper­a­tional effi­cien­cies, improv­ing cost and data out­puts for our cus­tomers.”

Pre­vi­ous­ly, progress mon­i­tor­ing of the con­struc­tion site was most­ly man­u­al and sub­jec­tive. Some drone sur­veys had been con­duct­ed, but these were lim­it­ed, infre­quent, and required on-site per­son­nel.

With advance­ments in drone tech­nol­o­gy and Sky­ports’ exper­tise, this process has now been ful­ly auto­mat­ed — elim­i­nat­ing the need for on-site pilots or access.

To pro­vide detailed next-lev­el data, the data col­lect­ed by the drone is being processed by DroneDe­ploy, pro­vid­ing both 2D and 3D sur­vey out­puts for progress mon­i­tor­ing reports.

Pro­vid­ing a detailed 3D mod­el of the bridge each week, it allows HOCHTIEF to track con­struc­tion progress and mon­i­tor any occur­rences, help­ing to iden­ti­fy any issues ear­ly and reduce the chance of over­runs or delays to the project.

HOCHTIEF is an engi­neer­ing-led glob­al infra­struc­ture solu­tions provider with lead­ing posi­tions in North Amer­i­ca, Aus­tralia and Europe and a strong pres­ence in the rapid­ly expand­ing strate­gic growth mar­kets of data cen­ters, ener­gy and sus­tain­able infra­struc­ture mar­kets.

Klaus Grüt­tner, Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent Europe, HOCHTIEF Infra­struc­ture, said: “By part­ner­ing with Sky­ports, we have a lead­ing inno­va­tor in drone tech­nol­o­gy at our side to dri­ve our com­plex con­struc­tion projects.

“This coop­er­a­tion enables us to mon­i­tor the con­struc­tion progress seam­less­ly and cost-effi­cient­ly and to pro­vide tar­get­ed sup­port in billing, espe­cial­ly in earth­works. In addi­tion, we ben­e­fit from pre­cise sur­vey­ing data that sup­ports a con­tin­u­ous target/actual com­par­i­son and the opti­miza­tion of our con­struc­tion process­es.”