Lidar-equipped drone adapted for soil volume inspection in support of marine construction projects

A drone built by technology company ACSL has been adopted to Penta Ocean Construction's proprietary real-time receipt inspection system of soil volume loaded on a barge using a drone equipped with a 3D-lidar sensor and an LTE module.

ACSL said that, in the construction of breakwaters or quay walls, it is necessary to inspect the quantity of stone, sand, and other materials loaded on each box barge to control the quantity of work.

In Penta-Ocean Construction, four to six staff members of the main contractor on a box barge used to inspect the quantity of sand and stone using range rods or flagging tapes, a process that took about 20 minutes, and forms had to be prepared after returning to the office.

When a barge was offshore, staff members had to travel back and forth by a transportation boat, and in some cases, it took more than an hour to complete the inspection.

ACSL is developing domestically produced industrial drones, which are already being used in various fields such as infrastructure inspection, logistics, disaster situation monitoring, and security.

ACSL has developed its own flight controllers for controlling drones, and since these are domestically produced and secure as well as capable of integrating functions with lidar and expand functions such as data uploading via LTE communication, these have been selected by Penta Ocean-Construction.

With the system developed by Penta-Ocean Construction, a lidar-equipped drone will be flown over the box barge by a land-based staff member, who photographs the loading conditions with an optical camera and uses 3D-lidar to measure the loading shape in the hold for five seconds, enabling the loading volume to be calculated and displayed immediately and forms to be generated automatically.