Bringing a massive drone construction survey in-house for a low-cost, high-quality solution
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the seventh most populous country on Earth. It also boasts the largest economy in Africa, based on the International Monetary Fund GDP calculations and is the world’s 24th largest economy. For this reason, it’s listed as an emerging market by the World Bank. So it’s no wonder that development firms are interested in investing in its infrastructure. One key project underway now is a massive modern urban center called Abia Heritage City.
“Abia state in Nigeria has two cities and they are overpopulated,” said Christopher Odiachi, General Manager at GeoNel Holding Company, who is working with the design consulting firm, Architekt Muri. “We went into partnership with the state government to put Heritage City in between them. Nigerians are returning home from outside the country, and they basically can’t have the same lifestyle they had outside. We want to have a well-planned and well-laid-out city for them. Thanks to WingtraOne, we’ve now gathered the terrestrial map to properly plan this city.”
Indeed, the Heritage City Project is slated to be the finest city in the region. So these first critical planning stages are essential to accomplishing this vision. GeoNel executives saw that drones could tackle surveying the best. However it took several attempts to find the right drone, and they’re sharing their story to provide a shortcut to firms who might be tempted to take the same route.
- Topographic surveys
- Nigeria
So we had big problems with the first drones we tried, and we knew we needed other equipment and that’s when we saw the Wingtra.
Christopher Odiachi
General Manager at GeoNel Holding Company
Not all drone construction surveys are equal
The idea of the Heritage City project was conceived in 2016. The key assets that Architekt Muri needed from GeoNel was an aerial map of the project site plus a surface terrain model. For this project, a terrestrial survey would cost about 62,000 Euros, Odiachi said.
“And my boss had heard about drones doing surveys, so we contacted a company offering drone survey data. They gave us a quote. It was going to take them 20 days with a DJI Phantom 4 drone, and it was going to cost 80,000 Euros.”
With a limited knowledge about drones, GeoNel executives concluded that it would be better to invest this money in a drone and bring the tech and the survey in-house.
“We identified a hexacopter drone and went to Germany,” Odiachi said. “It cost about 60,000 Euros for the base and rover system with a Sony Alpha 6000 payload. So we came back, hired a consultant, and because this drone had no PPK, we realized we needed to put down 180 GCPs. We spent four days setting them out.
“This drone only flew 11 minutes. So after four days of flying—battling rainy weather, short flight times and people stealing the GCPs—we stopped and said ‘this is impossible.’”
The team started researching PPK and RTK systems and decided to put PPK on the drone. But this complicated the workflow with a third-party software to post process, and then there were trigger mismatches, i.e., difference between the triggering and saving to the memory card.
We bought WingtraOne, and we surveyed the whole site in two days with it.
Christopher Odiachi
General Manager at GeoNel Holding Company
