Stories about drones and their commercial use cases
Construction sites use RTK-enabled mapping drones for progress monitoring. Which one you need comes down to three things: the size of the site, how often you want to fly it, and what you need to measure. Those answers point to a compact drone like the DJI Mavic 3E, a mid-size Matrice 4E, a docked system, or a fixed-wing aircraft.
After floods and mudslides cut off villages in Nepal’s Nuwakot district in late August, a team of police, army and civilian pilots used DJI FlyCart 100 drones to fly 1.5 tonnes of food and medicine across the Trishuli River in three days, while thermal drones searched for missing people. In July, drones restored phone coverage across roughly 50 square kilometres of flood-hit Guangxi in China, as others searched and delivered supplies below them.
A container terminal is one of the hardest places to fly a drone. Steel structures, moving cranes, heavy radio traffic, salt air, strong sea winds and airspace restrictions all work against it. It is also where aerial inspection pays off fastest, because the alternatives are a rope access team, a crane shutdown or a boat.
In this article we cover which drones are best suited to port use, what sensor payload each task needs, and what a terminal has to have in place on the ground before any of it works.
