Turner Construction: Inside the Jobsite of the Future

Hello, everybody, and, thanks so much for joining us today for the, webinar inside the job side of the future. Before we dive in, I just want to cover a quick, few, housekeeping notes here. And first, much like many webinars you guys may have attended in the past, we will be recording this. And so if you need to step away or maybe you wanna revisit a part of the conversation we'll have here today, we'll make sure we send you the recording afterwards just for your reference.

And then if any of you have any questions along the way, by all means, feel free to drop those into the, question and answer area, and we'll make sure we'll keep an eye on those and respond to those in the next best opportunity.

I know that we wanna keep things a little bit more interactive here, so we'll try to address as many of those throughout the the webinar, and, get your answers. So with that, we'll go ahead and get started here.

So, my name is Jason Tillman. I'm the director of product marketing over here at Skydio, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Jerry Gary Chapman from, Turner Construction. And, Gary, perhaps maybe you can, briefly introduce yourself and your role over at Turner.

Sure. Yeah. Hey, Jason. Happy to be here for sure. But my name is Gary Chapman.

I'm our virtual design and construction, regional manager, for Turner Construction. Sitting in the Nashville, Tennessee office is typically my neck of the woods, and kind of support projects through the southeast, and really just all over the company. So yeah.

Excellent. We'll go ahead and get started here by kicking off through some of the current challenges with job site oversight today, and then we'll, take a look at what's changing with the tools we actually have available at the moment. And then, Gary will take it from there and show us what it's like to put something like this into practice and how Turner is actually using drone based automation to improve coordination, quality, and efficiency out there.

And so to get things started, let's think about what it takes to keep a job site on track. And so there's dozens of moving parts. There's multiple subcontractors, tons of equipment, weather delays, and tight schedules. And the big challenge isn't just executing the work.

It's really knowing what's going on in real time. So the superintendent may walk the site maybe once a day. You maybe have the safety lead checks in maybe once a week, but nobody can be everywhere at once. And most of the data, whether it's photos or updates or observations, those are really collected manually, inconsistently, and uploaded later, if sometimes even at all.

And so that's a massive visibility gap that really slows everyone down.

And so let's look at how decisions typically unfold. So maybe something happens at the site. Maybe it's a trench was filled in or maybe delivery was missed. But unless someone really documents it, shares it, and escalates it, really, nobody knows about it. So there's a lag between these processes steps here of incident capture, reporting it, and then ultimately making the decision.

And so by the time that someone acts, the schedule's already slipping or maybe someone's already at risk. So what we really need is a way to compress this timeline and to get actionable visibility while work is actually happening and not simply after the fact.

And so this is an example of what an efficient, scalable mission workflow could look like. And so you start with the mission.

You plan the flight remotely. You collect the data, send it to the cloud, and then have it analyzed or reviewed by your team all without needing anyone on-site every single time. But for most teams, the reality is actually quite different, especially during this capture stage where things oftentimes break down. So it could be because of the person who you need might be unavailable. Maybe the drone that you need requires a skilled pilot.

Perhaps even maybe that the site may be too large to cover quickly or maybe even that the images may not be detailed enough in order to make a decision or or otherwise. And so this slows down everything and limits what you can inspect and then necessarily how often.

So drone based inspection, particularly those autonomous drones, really solve this capture problem. So first, it's fast. You can scan a site in minutes rather than hours. Second, it's consistent, so you get the same angles.

You get the same altitude, the same flight path every single time. And that's huge for progress tracking and comparison over time. And it's also very versatile. So with modular sensors, you can zoom in, on things.

You can get thermal readings for hot spots or maybe even wide angle views of staging areas. And because no one really has to walk the site or operate the drone manually, you can you really reduce that risk while increasing your coverage out there.

So this really brings us to the concept of what we refer to as the digital superintendent.

So think of this as kind of a virtual assistant for site oversight. It's always available, and it's always aware. So instead of relying on someone walking the job site with a checklist, the system flies on its own. You can schedule flights daily or hourly or wherever really is most convenient for you. You can trigger them remotely, and you can inspect overnight, pre shift, or maybe even after storms or other events.

And it's a new way to really maintain a level of situation awareness, not with people, but with better automation.

And then the data captures flows directly into your systems for analysis or review or really what's what's, needed for your moment.

And so how do you really bring this to life? And so we really see this as with the Skydio x ten and the dock. And then the x ten is the drone that is intelligent and avoids obstacles. It flies even in areas where GPS might not be the best and unreliable.

And it's modular, meaning, really, it can adapt to your changing needs, and that includes attachments offering RTK, PPK for those precision mapping situations. It could be spotlight when you wanna put more light on a particular area, or it could be speakers if you wanna have a one way communication to maybe someone breaching your perimeter or maybe some sort of security violation that's out there. And so, so whether it's really needing a wide area overview or maybe a detailed look at maybe some reward placement, It really adapts with your needs there. And then the dock is really designed for those tough job site environments.

It's IP rated. It protects the drone, keeps a charge, and then allows it to fly fully autonomously.

And then for connectivity, how do you actually maintain that? We have SkyoConnect, and that really makes sure that you're not tethered to the site. And so you can fly remotely from a controller nearby.

You can control it, a lot more remotely over LTE or five g from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. And this flexibility really means that you can inspect when you need to, and what you need to inspect regardless of who's physically on-site.

But, you know, really, this isn't really theoretical. You know, autonomous drones have already been in use by, those in the construction industry, particularly those companies you actually see here. This is a great opportunity to actually hear from Gary, and see how he's actually implemented this over at Turner. So I'll pass it off to you, Gary.

Yeah.

Appreciate it. Let me get my screen queued up.

K. You guys see my screen okay, Stu?

Yeah.

Good deal. Well, as I mentioned before with Turner Construction, just a little bit about, Turner. I think it's, it's kind of it puts a lot of context on how critical the decisions we make around things like drones are, because, you know, we're we're the the nation's largest contractor, and we do a lot of work, a lot of a lot of risk that's out there.

We have about twelve thousand employees, and that's always growing. We and we complete about fifteen hundred projects a year, which is a lot of, not only a lot of projects, but a lot of opportunity.

And we do a lot of different, you know, diverse industries as well. Right? And I think, hopefully, that should touch to a lot of folks on this call where, you know, historically, you might look a lot of tech, and drones is one of those, right, that are only really leveraged to its maximum capabilities in, like, data centers or or large, maybe sports projects. And they're not really they're not really, a good fit for those smaller jobs.

It might be, you know, government office, you know, or, you know, just a a small manufacturing building. But with this type of of access and which we'll kinda get into later on, it really touches everything that that that really everyone on this call, I'm sure, does. You don't have to be in the data centers. You don't have to be into to commercial offices or or, or, you know, airports even.

This really touches everyone, that should be on this call that's in the space.

And wanted to kinda throw this slide there because to kinda show how important it is for us to choose our partners.

You know, we've we've chosen to work with Skydio. It's been great for for, you know, for, I guess, going on a little over a year now.

But with such a large network of projects that we have globally, as you can see on the screen, you know, I think we all know one mishap or one issue can have detrimental, you know, detrimental impact to our company as a whole. So there is a lot of red tape within Turner, a lot of, risk management, that goes on. And, and that's what you know, making the right choice with the right company is is not only crucial for us, but, hopefully, that you guys are are taking that into consideration that, you know, what impacts one project is really it could have ripple effects across your organization.

But, really, just my my our drone vision statement, it's really around just having that network of, you know, on demand sensors. Right? I think that's the key. Right? That on demand way we could capture data wherever we're at, that kind of fosters that shift in that focus around not so much how it's collected. Right?

But more how the data is applied. Right? How it's how it's used to analyze existing conditions, how it can, how it can really, you know, predict trends. And you're really putting all of that power, in the right person's hands, right, to make the best decision at that time.

Right? So I think you guys have heard of that a lot probably. You know, the right data to the right person to make the best decision, that's certainly applicable to how, how remote operations with with docs and not just docs, but any type of remote robot, you can kind of apply that to. So that's where I I we're trying to push everything around drones, and we're really trying to get away from that, kind of manual flights and the the the, you know, a manual, operator or manual pilot even.

Our personal workflow is pretty simple. For for years now, really, we've been using, I would say, almost a decade, really.

Work really, really closely with drone deploy. We basically they're enterprise customer of ours where we run everything through drone deploy, whether that's ground capture with, you know, SpotDOG or other type of ground robotics or, you know, of course, aerial data, obviously, with the the mini drone, platforms out there. But really in the last year or two, we try to focus on, okay, what's the next version of aerial data capture gonna look like? And it's definitely around a dock workflow. So we really looked at, you know, you know, there's a couple players in the dock space out there, and what's the best choice for for where our vision's at and where we're trying to get to as a company and where we see the job side of the future going.

And so that's where we utilize our hardware. It's kind of a hard line in the sand. Right? Our hardware is a Scottio platform, obviously, a next ten with the dock, in this case.

And we just simply use the open API that's between Skydio and DroneDeploy, to just push all of that to DroneDeploy. So, out of the thousands of users we have across the company, really across the world that use DroneDeploy all the time, We're not really interrupting that process by by introducing a different way we're collecting the data. It's still pushed out to drone deploy. So as the end user, the back end user, they they don't know if it came from a doc, a drone, a person. It's it's all in that drone deploy platform. It's easily pushed over from, from the Skydio API that we have.

And what you know, our current model that we've had for really years, I mentioned earlier that we really don't have internal pilots, and that's really by design. We knew one day, right, that, it actually probably came a little quicker than I I would put my money on.

But one day, we would be where we're at today. Right? We would have a dock solution where we could comfortably, I think that's a key word, and confidently, conduct remote operations, in a safe, effective way. And if we can do that, do we really need to have, you know, pilots that, you know, we're buying new drones, new hardware year after year after year, and we're really investing in a lot of people's times to become expert pilots because, you know, there's a time and a place for everything.

And we're we're a Turner construction company. We're not Turner drone pilot company. Right? We're we build buildings.

As much as I would love to have, you know, network of on-site pilots, we're just that's just not what we do as a company. Right? So we really looked at how can we leverage, kind of that scalability of flying drones. And we've used we've been using for, I guess, five or six years now ever since they came out with it. The data on demand services from DroneDeploy, we just describe it as Uber for drones.

If you just think about that for a sec, Uber for drones. There's that, I would think, should explain it to, you know, crystal clear of how, how you want a drone map, drone data, drone anything to do with the drone or aerial data, you basically order it through data on demand. And a day or two later, it's there on your dashboard, and we're not really really focused on how it's collected, but more so how we're analyzing it. So this process is very repeatable. It's very scalable.

It's not the upfront cost is, of course, is is greater because we're having to pay for this service. But you gotta look at it, like, having one pilot. You know? I'm paying them to fly three different jobs in a day.

That's expensive whenever I could have that same, you know, three projects flown from me sitting at my desk or from someone on the other side of the country sitting at their desk or anything that, you know, that comes that comes, to mind when it comes to the needing aerial data. So we really put all of our focus on having zero on-site pilots and utilizing data on demand.

And, of course, I think everyone on this call, you're probably on this call because you already know this. But this this type of technology, though, kinda going off script here, but what excites me the most about this conversation that we're having today is that out of all the technologies that are out there, and that's part of one of my main jobs, right, is to assess, you know, what's out there in the industry and, you know, kind of hand choose what we think is best at the time to have the biggest impact to to our company of building buildings. Right?

And what excites me the most about this topic is, by far, aerial data or drones specifically has that biggest impact across the most folks in construction or in even the AEC side.

You have a lot of technologies that might, you know, impact a certain, you know, field or a certain, department. But as you can see, this is kinda in chronological order, where from the very, very beginning at planning a site, site development, boom drones, civil estimating drones, site visualization drones.

The list goes on and on and on all the way through the very end of the project, for those final as builds. Right? So our marketing, our BD teams, our owners, our clients, our design teams, our punchlet or our engineers, our, media folks, quality control, our safety group, huge, huge asset. I've actually tried to argue of of how the safety team should be paying for drones, not the the, you know, the BIM or the VDC team because, you know, they can get just as much, if not more benefit from just, you know, their safety workflow.

So I think we all agree that drones are an an incredible useful tool. And when you can combine that type of usefulness across all of our projects, it really becomes, you know, wanting more and more of it. And that's kind of been our problem. You can see this is our timeline.

We've, got about four hundred and thirty three active projects. So a few months old.

But we're obviously adding more projects, you know, year after year after year.

And we we fly a lot, but, again, we don't have any internal drone pilots. This is all from, a third party drone service that flies for us and collects the data.

Switching gears again, going through a couple more slides, because I really wanna get into the live demo to to get some questions and and get your guys' mind kinda thinking of where where you guys could take it.

But we we utilize everything from, you know, this this remote capability for, you know, for drones, not just for aerial data, but for ground as well. So whether it comes from the air, whether it comes from the ground, it all kinda filters into that, into our choice of a enterprise platform, which is drone deployed that we've had a lot of success with. And I'm sure most of the folks on this call has as well.

Kind of switching gears to our current state, what we're doing today, and this was, again, a screenshot from this week from about thirty minutes ago or maybe an hour ago, but, this is what we're doing today. So we have our our doc from Scotty that we'll get into in a sec. And our teams just go in just like a meeting room. I'm sure most of you guys have in your offices. You know, you can go book a you know, reserve a meeting room.

But to manage the the demand for, you know, the usage of of the dock or the drone that's in the dock. Right?

You know, we just implemented a calendar. It says, hey. You want time with the dock? Go in there. If it's available, book it. If it's not, you know, wait your turn.

Don't interrupt our mapping missions or daily things that we do typically from three to five, or three to five thirty. Other than that, you know, there's, you know, our OAC meeting we had. I took this screenshot during our OAC meeting a few hours ago, and, you know, we do those live updates instead of aerial pictures from last week or a couple days ago or even yesterday.

It's always awesome and great, but there's always something about, well, they don't look like that that now or that doesn't that changed or this is has this started yet. But when you show a live stream, in your OAC meetings and for you guys that don't know, OAC is your owner architect contractor meeting. It's the the one formal meeting you have during the week where you talk about, you know, really high level things with owners, and they really wanna know progress. And, again, we've had a lot of success showing, just that live stream of the site, at that time.

And the really cool thing is, and you'll see later, you don't even have to join the meeting to see what's going on. Everyone knows at that time frame the drone's in the air. And if they really wanna just see what's going on with the site, just just log in to the link that we have, and you can just look at it on your phones to see what's going on. They're starting to call it the drone show.

Right? What time is the drone show on? It's on, you know, every Wednesday at eleven to two or eleven to one. So really cool way to share data.

But that's how, you know, today, we're we're managing access and we're pushing it to our teams.

Again, we just started this a few months back, so we're really just now comfortable getting people to just, you know, utilize it for a lot of different things. So I can come back to that slide if we need to, but, also, what we're currently doing with, all of these missions, right, is that we have these preplanned missions that fly, you know, automatically. We have some that if somebody picks up the phone and says, you know, hey, Gary. I got a I got a issue with the Bollinger Bridge. Right? I can just simply hit run that mission, and it'll just, of course, take us straight out there to it.

You can import, like, locations and things from other softwares like Procore or or ACC of where you can, you know, have a list of all of your rooms or your areas that's of interest. And then you can create those custom missions inside the Skydio cloud where and it's kinda limitless. Right? And that's kinda what we're doing now. We're having hundreds and hundreds of of missions that if this topic comes up, it can just go straight to it.

And that's really helpful over huge sites. Right? You know, one site that we're currently, on now, you know, it's a it's about, you know, five, seven hundred and fifty acres or so. So if someone wants to talk about, you know, a a manhole on the other side of the site, you know, it's a lot easier just to hit the button to take me there than to try to navigate through it and and to see where to go and and all that good stuff.

So we have all of these missions preplanned out. And, really, what all this is for, it's it's to kind of feed that those different AI platforms. Right? We haven't really hit on that yet, but but that's really what excites me the most.

And I think that's what excites the industry is now that you have these different AI tools that are kind of doing a lot of the analytical work for you, you really can just you're really limited on, you know, how often can you give it information to analyze.

And that's that's a big thing we'll probably probably end on. But, keep that in mind that for me personally, and I know the industry as a whole for the most part, it's not really been about capturing the data. It's about capturing it often.

And Okay. Yeah. Go ahead.

Couple quick questions that just came in. Hopefully, you have on this. First one is how are Grant was asking, how are you assessing what kind of project gets a drone, gets a drone asset?

So great question. And right now, it's basically everyone, because two reasons why I say that. One is we did a a cost or a kind of cost comparison on how we're currently, you know, utilizing drones on sites. And I mentioned earlier, we're using data on demand and some of these third party third party pilots.

And there's a cost there. Right? And, and we anticipate those costs into our overall budgets. But when we're looking at this, this kinda takes away that that cost that we we were carrying anyways for drone pilots and drones in general.

It kinda just replaces that cost. Right? Because now it's it's always on-site as a tool, you know, and the robot doesn't care if it gets paid a dollar an hour or fifty bucks an hour. Right?

It's gonna it's gonna do the work. So what kind of projects? Obviously, this is, you know, new to the, the industry as a whole, but we are planning on, looking at our bigger sites first that has the largest footprint, just because it's, you know, it's a useful tool for efficiencies to kinda get around to cover large areas. But, as you'll see later on, you can do interior flights.

It really might make a lot of sense for our high rises, right, to go in and out of different levels quickly where, you know, spot dogs or ground robotics are kinda limited. So there's really no no right or wrong answer. I think to answer the question simply, it's if you have a budget for drone data on your project and you're planning to use drones on your project, then this would be a candidate.

And how you just brought up the interior way, I should Connor asked a very similar question. Like, with the obstacle avoidance in the x ten, and others some of the key safety capabilities, how can this technology be used indoors to benefit, like, inspections or quality control or kind of working in place tracking? But it sounds like you you're gonna be covering that a little bit later.

So Yeah. Who asked that question again?

Connor.

Connor. Yeah. So Connor is he's he's reading my, what excites me the most too. Right? This to Connor, this is to your point and your question of once once you kinda see this computer vision and this autonomy, navigation and how it confidently navigates its surrounding areas is the first place my mind went was, man, this would be a great interior tool as well. So, so, yeah, we'll demo some of that. We'll fly into a little little area and, and the the confidence that I have with the obstacle avoidance, you know, knock on wood, you know, that allows you to kind of conduct those those inspections, especially within that the ninety degree gimbal that we'll look at.

So, yeah, that's that's a a a great place where your mind's going because it's a great tool for outside, but it's not limited to just outside. So great question.

So that future state, that we're looking at, of course, is now that we're feeding this AI beast or this AI machine, you know, let's run it through our existing platforms that we already have.

What you're seeing on the screen is our existing platform that we have with DroneDeploy and their safety AI platform where, you know, historically, we've uploaded ground data to it, because we really couldn't capture data that often from the air. And we didn't wanna fly, you know, once a month or once a week, and then, you know, it pop a safety issue from a week ago, right, that would have been critical and could have killed somebody. Right? So we've typically only used it, the safety AI type of features with ground data, because we're capturing all the time on the ground.

But with the air, right, you can really, feed this AI, AI I keep going AI beast, so I think that's just the best way to to describe it. Kinda feed this AI platform with data every day all the time over hundreds of acres. Right? It's not biased to how many it might take a little longer to process it.

Right? But it's still gonna ingest it. It's still going to, analyze it. It's still gonna provide valuable insights that used to take, you know, days, weeks, or or never even got caught altogether by our current safety teams no matter how how much we tried.

So, that's something if you guys park your mind on of, like, wow. If we could capture all the time and run it through some kinda AI platform, like, our safety folks could be you know, they could show up every morning and say, you know, this is what I need to address today instead of, you know, showing up. Okay. Let me go find areas that I need to address today.

Right? So it's really looking at efficiency, you know, super lean way to make our projects safer, to make our, safety professionals more efficient in their jobs. And something that a lot of people don't think of, it's a super your your corporate folks will love to hear this, but it's a really high impact. It's not really talked about that much.

It's lower your insurance rates potentially on projects. When you can capture data often, share that share how you're capturing data and how often you are on your job sites with your insurance providers, and you'd be shocked to find out that they will lower, or potentially, lower your some of your premiums that could result in, you know, millions and millions of dollars of savings across your projects. So, that's something that you know, it's a little nugget for you to take away. It's it's have conversation.

How much you guys are paying for insurance and just ask your insurance providers, what would your what would our premiums be if we could document the site every day thoroughly all the time?

You might be surprised. So this is a cool slide, and this is where we're taking it. I put, again, future state here, because with, you know I guess, I'm sure you guys are thinking already or aware. Right?

You do have to have a waiver to do all of this. Right? You can't just operate remote operations with, you know, with just a part one zero seven, and and that's it. Right?

You need to get your waivers, specifically around, your Beyond visual line of sight as well as your waiver around a BO.

We've obtained both of those.

And when you obtain obtain that through us with the Scottio platform and the dock platform, which is what our current waiver is for, you really can open it up to this is Nashville, Tennessee, for example. All those blue dots are all of our actual all of our drone deployed projects where we fly drones on, you know, constantly.

And there's no reason why I need to have one dock per one of those blue dots. Right?

Theoretically, I could have one dot for all of those because they're within, that's about a two mile radius.

And, you know, I have pushed the limits already with the dock, to about five miles. And I could've went even further, if I would've had another battery somewhere to to swap it out. So there's a lot of a lot of, you know, ways that you can start to think how you can support projects. I mentioned earlier, you don't have to have those big, you know, money heavy projects to to implement this kind of tech because, you know, you're spreading that cost over multiple jobs. So, you know, what would it took, you know let's just call it a hundred thousand dollars to get a doc, which that's not the case. That's just a number I threw out there. I can split that hundred k across three or four projects, and now it's it's it's all a lower cost to support multiple jobs.

So that's something that I'm we're excited about, to just have a conversation as they come up. You're talking with an owner or developer or civil engineer or architect or anywhere about any project anywhere in Nashville, for example.

You know, let's I think thirty five miles an hour is our max speed, but within thirty five miles an hour, I can, as a crow flies, I can get you there pretty quick.

So that's something that we're excited to kinda push out more and more to, just to support aerial data and those conversations that always comes up.

So really cool exciting concept there.

I think we've all started probably mapping with drones and construction, you know, creating the good old fashioned two d ortho mosaic. Right?

That's still really the MVP for construction, right, for inspections, for, you know, drones of first responder to other types of of industries, right, that might not be the case. But for construction, that two d ortho mosaic, that's key. It's accurate. Right? If it's an accurate two d ortho mosaic, that's super valuable. Right?

And you can see in this chart on the right side, this is all within our company. People still utilize, do, and capture the map view the most often even though we have, you know, different ways of view data, walk throughs, three sixties, photos, link shares, issues. It's still overwhelmingly the map view.

Because with that map view, right, you're able to now ingest that that map view or that two d ortho mosaic, which is, of course, also a three d mesh that can be inserted into those AI analytical platforms that we talked about, right, that can, you know, find out what trenches are more than four foot deep and require, you know, a ladder, where, you know, it can tell you how far apart, you know, fire extinguishers are from each other. It can quantify on a large area how many porta johns do you have on the job site. It can tell you, you know, almost any and everything you wanna know through that two d ortho mosaic.

So that's that's our main capture is that because we can utilize that for a lot of other different workflows. The key takeaway here is is that if you don't have this and you don't have this in an accurate way and you don't have it in a often or if you're not capturing it often enough, it's kinda the opposite, and it's kinda useless. Right? How many times have you guys had, you know, a superintendent you're showing an issue to and, you know, the first answer is, like, we got that fixed already, or that was from two days ago or last week or, you know, this is not what the site looks like right now or the cranes on the other side of the site or all these things.

And it's and they're always right because this was old data. Even though it's fairly new, it's got to be very, very, very recent.

That day, same day, maybe a few hours ago, maybe yesterday at the latest. But when you're able to take that real time two d map and run it through a lot of different AI platforms, you can really get some some awesome up to date insights that has a huge impact to the project.

Gary, question. Another one came in from also from Grant.

He wants to know what kind of software training programs are are you developing to ensure that the drones are being used effectively and intended for each project, and who must be trained within the project team?

Yep. Good good question, Grant. When we do the live demo, I'll kinda show some, specific missions in our interface, but but, ultimately, the training that's needed, one that all comes from Skydio. Right? Whenever you guys get a doc, that's part of their platform, they make sure that you have a successful rollout.

You know, they'll gather any pilots that you wanna have or anyone really that you wanna have, trained on it, and make sure that you guys are comfortable walking away, from that training, you know, with everything that you need to know.

So I went through all of that really, really, it's a it's a simple platform. Again, you have to understand, like, this this is made for first responders, for police officers, for people whose main job is not to be a pilot. They need to focus on, you know, an an emergency. And so it needs to be as simple and easy and reliable as possible, which, you know, of course, downstream, it comes to us. We it's really not hard to train.

You know, after you guys watch this live demo, you're probably good enough to get a dock and and know how to turn it on and get a link to a website, and you're up and running. So so, hopefully, that answered that question. That's that that we need to go into some more detail on that. But, yeah, if you still have that question later on, Grant, the live demo, let's, circle back to it.

So, RTK for construction was really quick.

Very important.

Currently, with the first few phases of, with dock, they didn't have RTK available because, you know, again, more of an inspection tool, more of a, you know, RF police, you know, first responder type of tool. They didn't really need, you know, accurate data to map with.

But now that we do have the RTK module, successfully, paired with a with an x ten, you know, we're able to capture that data accurately, which can therefore filter right back into a lot of other, insights that we're looking for. And this is really what we're the most excited about is having that data ran through our AI platforms, captured accurately so it can push out, accurate insights that we're looking for. And we can go into a lot more of this, but this is this is, again, more of a drone deploy, type of workflow. It's just we're capturing the data accurately with the doc next ten often with remote flight deck to push it through those platforms inside drone deploy or wherever that you might be processing your data.

We got a or go ahead.

A quick question from Brett. He wants to know, like, do you have an established feedback loop for taking drone captures, creating point clouds, overlaying onto the BIM model, discovering and solve discrepancies, and publishing QC reports. So he's seen that he's con condensing this loop to the smallest period possible. Is it really a key output from the AI software? Software.

Yeah. So, I mean, the question is, if I heard it correctly, is are we doing that or have a workflow for it? Or was that the the the ultimate question, or was he wanting to know are we having success with it?

It's not so I'll just reread it. So he says, do you have an established feedback loop for taking those drone captures, creating point clouds, and overlaying on BIM models, discovering and solve discrepancies, and publishing QC reports?

Yeah. We don't have the, an active feedback loop, you know, really yet, for this specific platform. We do have, of course, you know, we've been mapping and creating, you know, those, point clouds and everything else that the the drone can, you know, recreate and bring that back into the BIM model, and civil engineering files all the time.

And there's a lot of feedback on there. Right? There's, you know, accuracy is is always a question. Like, this is not accurate, enough to work with their BIM files or civil files.

That's why I mentioned how important, you know, RTK or PPK is to work with this doc and this kind of a workflow. Because without that, any integrations that you have with with BIM files or civil files or or any kind of, you know, really any kind of file that you're trying to implement the data to is gonna be not accurate, which is trash. Right? So, it's got to be accurate, and that's typically the work the feedback that we get, is if something's off, then, you know, the trust is gone, then what else could be off?

So we don't have a feedback loop. It's more of a that's where our BIM or BDC folks, specifically in the company kind of take the data, that's produced from the drone, and they kind of are responsible for that kind of integration.

And, hopefully, that answered answered your question.

So the so the the cadence of capture is this last hurdle. Right? We've talked about it many times throughout this presentation on how, you know, if we could collect the data more often, it's more valuable.

This breakdown is basically just on our data to current. We have a lot of people viewing it, but we don't have a lot of capture happening.

And it's not necessarily saying that what was, you know, captured wasn't viable to view. Of course, it was. But I really would like to see that that eight percent or that blue number, be more of, like, half, or at least a quarter because the more the the larger that blue gets or that capture percentage gets, the more value or the more of the people that are viewing it's gonna get from it. Right? You're gonna get a lot more schedule comparisons, a lot more QAQC, a lot more safety, issues.

You're gonna get a lot more, you know, documentation. You're gonna get a lot more engagement on the project team with people that are remote.

So that's that's what this tool does for me. For me and then Turner's eyes, we see, you know, doc based operations, which was turning manual weekly captures, right, into hourly, you know, autonomous captures. Right? Not once a day, but, you know, when you can take a map and only need, you know, between grid lines five and thirteen because that's all that I'm, you know, interested in.

That can be done in less than a minute, depending how close the dock is from it. So you can fly multiple times a day, multiple missions, but the more often you can capture the data, I think the more valuable it's gonna be.

So, I'll pause for a few other questions if there's any in the chat. If not, I'll give everyone a chance to kind of, either watch my screen, of course, do a live demo with, you know, on the screen.

But, also, you can, you know, hit that QR code on your on your mobile device or your phone or, that link, of course, works, but it's probably easier just to to watch it on your phone.

And this is how I mentioned earlier the drone show or, you know, that that link is we've actually put the link to the drone show in a lot of our meeting invites.

So when Microsoft Team goes out Yeah. To join the meeting, but then here's the link to, to see the drone, and the certain times that it might fly. So if you missed that link, we'll come back to it inside the interface, but I'm just gonna jump straight in.

You guys need to confirm you can still you can see my screen now looking at the dock and the country map?

Yep. Cool. So, currently, I'm sitting, in North Carolina, a small little area, in North Carolina.

This dock here is sitting in, outside of Memphis, Tennessee, and, we're gonna jump into it. Right? So I'll kinda go into the manual interface or manual flight, and then, you know, just to kinda show you guys, just how it works. But keep in mind, this is a manual flight. The beauty of all this is me not flying it manually and setting it up on a schedule, having it do its thing, you know, autonomously and upload the data autonomously back to things like drone deploy.

You know, this is the dock opening now. Looks like a beautiful day in, outside of Memphis, Tennessee.

We're gonna simply launch. Right? And there's a lot of other FAA, I guess, required things that's happening in the background right now. There's, there's a location being sent from where I'm at in North Carolina is the pilot in command, you know, back to the dock that's logging where, I'm the operator's at.

So there's there's, ADS B and going out. And if we're lucky, there's an airport that's here, and you'll see the ADS B, working in live action. It'll come up, and it'll it'll show me where that aircraft is at and and and share my, my locations and all that stuff. But I'm still gonna fly around. I'm gonna kinda do a a full screen here just to to get it. But, you know, you've got I'm in I'm w using WSD as a controller.

I am, you know, flying manually around. You can see, my top speed is about thirty five miles an hour.

I'm gonna enter the pointer lock. I like to use my mouse. It kind of lets me scroll around, look at things, and do any and everything you could do from a drone flight, you know, if you're there on-site. Right? You know, drones are fun. They're useful.

And there's nothing that I couldn't do here that I could've done if I was a drone pilot on-site. Right? You know, you can go down. You know, you can go up.

You can do a lot of different things. The cool thing I'll kinda show here is, this camera or the, x ten does have a great, two camera options. The main one we use is the wide lens where we can utilize it for, mapping, of course, is better with the wide angle lens. But they both have a great zoom, zoom capability on it, right, where if you're wanting to stay far away and look at you know, I'm sure most of us have done facade inspections where you're kinda nervous when you're up against those tall buildings in a in a urban area.

Right? But, you know, zoom cameras are nice for those types of instances, but this one has a sixty four times digital zoom. And I'll kinda just see this guy walk in there. Let's see if we can't pop in to see what he's up to before he goes behind this tree.

Oh, he's looking around.

Looks like he just changed his mind, decided to go back to, somewhere. Let's get a little closer. Alright. So, he's hopping in this gator with these folks.

Right? So, you know, you can even say see the, you know, the name of the company. It's Tennessee Builders. It's there.

I think that I know who that is.

So if I zoom from sixty four times in back to normal, you know, I'm way back here. Right? So there's a really great, you know, multiple levels of zoom that you can have on the camera. You can utilize it for a lot of different things, obviously.

You can just pop up. We we do this a lot on this big site. We pop up, and we'll just kind of see way on the other side of the site there instead of driving way out there. Right? We might just go and look way in to see, you know you know, where somebody's at on the other side of the site. So, you know, this is all that manual side that we talked about. We're just, you know, getting an eye in the sky, always having access to the site.

You know, Jason's on that digital superintendent earlier where, you know, superintendent can do, you know, an an a site audit to see what's going on. Right? You know, we've got, so and so coming in from I'm not sure where he came from, but, you know, maybe you might wanna know what that equipment is. Maybe the number on the equipment. Right?

You could fly over there to it. You could see, you know, what's going on. I know there was some guys who got stuck out here earlier.

I think he's still stuck out. No. He got out. He was stuck earlier. But won't get down the rabbit hole.

This is kind of fun stuff where you can really just fly around and and really kind of, you know, cover some ground here. But let me let me drop down. I'm gonna show you one more thing before I kind of run a a planned mission.

And, again, any questions that come up now, you guys can let me know if there's any in the chat, Jason. I'm happy to to take that. Yeah.

And, Gary, a couple things to keep in mind inside here that I think are pretty compelling. For those of you who scan that QR code, you can look at this on your own device as well. So it's a smartphone or tablet or PC or whatever. You can use and you can switch between, like, thermal or otherwise. So, therefore, if you have a whole bunch of people for, like you know, here's example is the drone show. Everyone can have a different kind of view of what it is on here. And then the other thing that's pretty interesting as well is, Gary, and this is the l version with the fifty megapixel, wide.

Is that Correct. Yep.

Yeah. So the zooming that he just did was not in our in with our telezoom. We actually have a model that actually has a zoom in there that does quite a bit more. So if you're looking for more instances where you need that zoom, we have a different, sensor package that does this. But the zoom that he just showed is actually just what you can get in the one that is more for, like you were saying, mapping and surveying and a lot of these wider angles that you need.

Yep. And that's where, you know, the thermal camera that's on it. Obviously, daytime is not the best use case for thermal. But for nighttime ops, we've flown multiple times at night and really could not, you could see miles and miles away.

We'd see deer out there. And, just thinking of it from different use cases at nighttime, You know, our waiver is included for nighttime ops ops so you can you know, a lot of a lot of construction happens at night, especially in urban areas with concrete pours and such. But, but, yeah, what I'm doing now basically is I'm just, you know, kind of dropping down, just looking up close at some things inside. I was wanting you guys to show you guys the maybe the ninety degree gimbal on it that's you know, where you can look up and when you can combine looking, at some you know, for inspection purposes.

So I kinda look up, and you'll see that the gimbal will just do, like, a ninety degree.

And I've got it in crawl mode now. I'm not sure if you guys noticed that little snail up there.

So moving really slow, but, you know, just from there it goes. It spins around. You know, now we're looking, you know, ninety degrees up.

And let me just go ahead and go in a little bit.

You know, Gary, a question that came in. Connor wanted to follow-up with regards to flying indoors.

He said, when do you determine when to fly indoors and for how long?

And do you have specific examples of when it's safest or possibly too risky?

Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, whenever people are not there is when we like to fly inside. Right? This is just a a barn that was beside the the project, right, that we're, we don't have a building yet out there.

But, you know, obviously, you don't wanna fly around people. Right? You don't wanna fly, in any kind of risky environment, but, you know, nighttime is probably typically the best time to fly indoors, but, it really just depends on, you know, what you're trying to accomplish. There's no really limit to, you know, a good or bad time.

You know, if there's an inspector on-site and he's wanting to see, you know, weld inspections. Right? Maybe you come in and, document some some welds and and and take pictures of them. This is kinda what I was showing you guys here.

When you're looking at this, you can really zoom in pretty pretty tight to you know? I was seeing some ants appear the other day. I thought it was really cool.

But You know, one one thing to keep in mind as well is that what you're seeing here, if you see a little latency and everything, this is actually a stream of a stream.

So he's streaming it on his here, and then he's sharing it on his platform here. So, those of you who actually are looking at that QR code, you're gonna notice it's much much cleaner and much, crisper.

Yep. And one thing I'll note too here is, like, again, stadiums is a really great one because you're, you know, you're inside a huge area that you can kinda fly up and down, look under. Data centers is great because you have a lot of, again, high ceilings. But anywhere that you have high ceilings, you can fly, but that's not necessarily saying you can't use it. Right? Like, right now, I'm going to, like, literally, you know, try to hit this thing.

I've done it, you know, many, many times, and it will not let me. But I'm gonna go basically I'm full speed. I'm holding I'm holding the throttle wide open, trying to hit this, you know, this column, and it's just pushing me around it. Right?

Now I'm in crawl mode. But, like, right now, it will not go because it's saying that I'm, you know, I'm too close. So I could do two things. I could, you know, drop it down and then, you know, of course, go forward that way and then get off you know, find its own way out, or I could, you know, find another way.

But the obstacle avoidance is not your typical, it's a computer vision system where, kinda kinda look at it like your eyes. If you have you know, you can get really close to most of us can, I guess, really close to something without bumping your head? It's got the same same theory. You can get really close to things, but it knows when, you know, when not to, you know, get a little too close.

And you can adjust those settings, like, right here in the settings. If I wanted to, I mean, get really, really, really, really close, I could change, you know, my obstacle avoidance settings were four inches away. You know, eleven standard is about twenty six inches away or none at all. So there's a lot of control here, but with the Zoom camera that's on here, I really find it, you know, difficult to ever need to fly close to something unless you're maybe trying to fly through a doorway.

And even then, they claim anything larger than a half an inch, it will, you know, pick up. But, you know, that's that's I haven't crashed it yet, and I don't know of anybody that has. So I'm just comfortable of being able to get within a couple feet and zoom in. You can see that wasp that's on the back of that. But, so, yeah, just a lot of use cases indoors. So, any other questions that popped up in the chat? Yeah.

We actually have two more on here. One of them from Grant again is, in your quest to roll out and implement this kind of technology, who have been your biggest champions? Like, what kind of job titles, of the tech at the tactical level?

So job titles, I mean, it's really more you know, we have a innovation team that kinda looks at innovation and things.

Robotics just kinda falls into the robotics world. Right? But but, realistically, it's it's operations and our projects that are on the ground. And and and because this specific technology is doesn't really necessarily require a a person to be expert in the hardware, and whenever you look at the autonomous flights, I'm gonna go ahead and just land this and run an autonomous flight while we're talking. But, but, it really can be anyone. You get a part one zero seven, and you get your company. Every company has a little different, you know, way that they want to, control and validate, the air traffic control.

So I'm gonna hit cancel here. And we're gonna go to the map view.

We're gonna see where this aircraft is. So you can see it to my left there. Real time, it's making a descent. It's, obviously gonna land in this strip, and, it really allows you to, again, to have that ADSB out where you can really, monitor air traffic control.

So this is not gonna do anything. It's not gonna force you to land. It's just telling you, hey. There's an aircraft in the area.

And so, that was really important to get our waiver from the FAA. They really like that feature that Skydio has, and, you know, it's built in with, with their ADS B, on the drone. So that's gonna be cool.

And one more question from, Jordan here is, he says, do you encounter any issues with subcontractors? We're concerned with maybe privacy or not wanting to be filmed at the job sites.

Well, not necessarily. Some some projects are, like hospitals and health care. You know, there's a concern there that you know, real a real concern that, I know a drill employee has a feature where they're starting to blur out faces and things. So that kind of, as you have platforms that will blur out faces because it's, again, every everything is smart.

Right? It's it's running things through AI. And before it runs things through AI, it could easily run through, you know, facial recognition in anywhere where there's a face to blur it out. Right?

So that can the future will get more and more where that's not an issue. But, specifically, with subcontractors, that's kinda part of, like, you know, when they they sign up on get on board. Right? They're, they're going through site orientation, and they're not, you know, we're not they're not a public person at that point.

They're a contractor for us. So not so much, but it is a real thing, especially with some clients who are concerned with with that around health care, looking in windows, some of that stuff. Okay.

Was there another question that you had in the chat?

No. No. That that was the that was the last one. So if anybody has any questions, by all means, submit those in.

We wanna make sure we get your questions answered.

And I'm just gonna run this this preplan mission, you know, so I can stop messing with my my keyboard.

But, yeah, this is this is one of those autonomous missions that are ran either daily or, multiple times a day, and, it just really puts the power of data capture into, you know, into anyone's hands. Right? So what's gonna happen?

Can you just or go ahead.

No. You just walk us through, like, what what's the mission on here. So, these are the points that you're seeing here. The number of points on the right hand side are the areas that's gonna go and do some sort of action.

Yep. So what you're seeing here, these are preplanned missions or preplanned. It's got a a waypoint mission, of course. But, it's really cool because you can see I planned this waypoint mission at different elevations.

Right? So even the camera angles, you can see where it's gonna point to. So, you know and this is where I want hundreds of these, where whenever I'm trying to have a conversation around, I can really create customized missions, views for mapping, just for progress, just for videos, anything around that. So, that's what you're seeing here on the screen.

And before I launch this, one of the really cool feature is this inspection mode. So I can go into inspection mode when I have the cover off.

And instead of, again, manually, you know, seeing if there's an issue with the drone, you can kind of tilt the hood and see, you know, if there's any bugs on there, if there's any kind of issue with the landing dock, if there's any, you know, whatever that might be.

You can even spin the props, on there to check and make sure the props are good.

One thing to note too, this it runs on we're using a Starlink temporary Internet connection, but, you know, you really want a good a good, established Ethernet connection that's hard lined to this dock to to get the maximum amount of latency and and no issues with uploading. But, but you can see I'm spinning the props, making sure all that works, but I'm just gonna exit inspection mode. I use this a lot of times just as a camera to see who's on the ground around it.

There's, of course, a weather station on it. Right? So you can, get live weather, weather information.

We had a couple tornadoes out in Memphis a couple weeks ago or about a month ago now. We were literally flying in the tornado weather and and capturing, live data on, you know, like, flood, you know, flood plains and when what happens when it pours rain, you know, flash floods and things. So it's pretty cool to have that capability to to be on-site whenever, you know, storms come or something that's unforeseen or planned happens, security. Alright.

You can tie these back to your, you know, fixed camera. We've had that too. We've got some fixed cameras that we've got out along the site perimeter. And the, the open API with it will trigger okay.

The drone will launch if it's, you know, detecting motion in this area, and it launches and it goes and it records.

It's that exact, you know, GPS location that we identified.

So you can integrate this across a lot of different platforms, not just drone deploy, in a lot of different ways. You can set it up on a schedule.

As it's flying now, I'll kinda flip over to another, another view that you can see. You know, this is flying. Like, right now, if I was, you know, Jason, for example, he could come in here and he could commandeer this and become the pilot. Right?

If he had access to there. Right? He could come in and and take control of of the drone if, you know, if there was an emergency or something. Right? So I'm kinda commandeering myself here, but in theory, you could do that.

So I'll mute up. But right now, what it's doing, again, it's, you know, you can see it's following the camera path. It'll turn to the the the angle that I wanted. This works really great for, like, marketing and some some other platforms that I've been in in the past where, you know, I kinda couldn't get the right angle that I wanted, or maybe I wanted a different gimbal angle at certain waypoints.

Maybe I wanted to increase the vertical reconstruction of something and, you know, wanna look under some trees or or whatnot. But you can really get creative and customize on on how you capture all of this data.

Hey, Gary. We got a question here asking, how does the drone respond to temporary flight restrictions?

So for TFRs, good question. And that's where keep in mind, this drone was built for first responders. Right?

So because this drone was built for first responders, let's just say that there's a emergency in New York City, and, you know, they needed the drone as a tool to, you know, to capture a bad guy or for what whatever they needed to use it for.

You know, just because there's a TR that's in the area does not mean it's gonna ground the drone. It's still gonna allow them to do it.

You know, it it will still pop up a notification, but it's not gonna restrict you from doing it, which is good and bad. Right? That's really up up to the pilot still at this point. Right? It's, you know, before you fly, before you're conducting flight missions, before you have any kind of scheduled, missions right, you know, you need to make sure there's no TFRs or no if there's any of them that are out there or anything that you might need to know. So that's still the responsible, responsibility of the pilot.

Because I didn't I I guess I didn't mention that on the preplanned scheduled missions, kinda like this one is, before that thing does go in the air, there is somebody, that we designate as a pilot in command. Typically, it's a person on-site. Currently, it's our safety guy right now, and our superintendent is a backup. But before that thing goes, they get a thing on their phone that says, you know, safe to fly.

And and they hit that safe to fly as long as it's safe to fly. Right?

If nobody clicks that safe to fly, then it would kinda default to another pilot, you know, command that we've designated.

It could be a drone employee. It could be whoever. And, you know, they would be responsible for making sure there's no NOTAMs or TFRs or anything out there. A good question.

Alright. It looks like we're getting kind of, right up on time here.

Just wanna see if I can show one final screen here, for you guys.

Just put that on here.

So first off, Gary, thanks very much for sharing that with us. I I know that the the live demo is always something that's that's always piques up interest and gets a lot of questions on there too. One thing I wanna share with you guys is we actually have another webinar coming up here pretty soon. It's gonna be the eleventh of next month, and that's gonna be achieving, precision mapping with RTK.

So it's all about precision mapping. We're gonna have a whole bunch of customers from construction companies, the DOT, Ohio DOT is gonna be there. We have HTR construction, that's gonna be there. We actually have a a a consultant who specializes in precision mapping as well as those gonna be on there.

So it's gonna be minimal Skydio talking and a lot of customers talking on this one. So I highly recommend if you wanna register, scan the QR code here, and we'd love to see you there. Again, have something very similar. Give the microphone to the customer, have them talk, and provide that over there.

But, for that, I'd love to Gary, thank you very much for, again, being here with us today. Been some great questions for everybody, and thank you for everybody in the audience for being here. We will make sure we send off a recording of this afterwards. But, again, thank you very much, and, hopefully, we'll see you, next month.

Yep. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Jason.

Alright. Thank you.

See you.