Approach

The goal of this project was to create a 3D As-Built environment that captured the current state of the substation. In addition to this, Flight Evolved integrated potential infractions, construction/engineering mistakes, and redline drawings. Our goal was to approach this project from a modeling perspective rather than typical engineering or surveying.Flight Evolved was tasked with gathering high-density UAV LiDAR for a 66kV substation in Southern California.

The purpose of this project was to gather both highly accurate, and highly dense, LiDAR data for creating a 3D as-built of the substation. In the past, our client was forced to rely on 2D red lines and engineering drawings to determine the compliance and post-construction project closeout documentation.

High density and precise calibration was the key objective with the flight plans. Flights were a grid mission over the substation to ensure that there was minimal shadowing, little to no data missing, and a minimum point density of 3,000 points per square meter.

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Conclusion

Our work flow was fairly straight forward, and the project went as planned. Often times, you can mitigate headaches and errors in the field just by having proper project planning and clearly defined objectives. In this case, we knew the exact accuracy and density requirements as well as the final deliverable. That meant we were able to plan our flights, gather the data, and process it all quickly and efficiently. You can see our final results/numbers below.