Drones connect EPCs and owner-operators

Posted: October 30, 2025

As of July, there were 433,407 commercial drones registered with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, with not a small number of them being used by the construction industry. Engineering and construction companies are learning that drones can pay dividends at every stage, from contracting through engineering, construction and ongoing maintenance.

Project planning and pricing

Drones are an inexpensive way for engineers to get high-quality information about building sites so they can give accurate assessments of the materials and costs a project will require before agreeing to a contract.

Ryan Hittie, senior innovation and operational technology specialist at Alabama construction firm Brasfield & Gorrie, says that drone surveys allowed the company to price out a project before the owner had even purchased the site:

“We have a lidar laser scanning payload for one of our drones and we're able to fly through a heavily wooded and vegetated site, see through trees and get a topography of the site and then provide, pretty much, an estimate to get the entire site building-ready.”

“We actually figured out how much dirt we were going to need to build up the pads that an owner wanted. We sent that data to another [subcontractor] who was building a retaining wall, and they were able to sketch out and price a 50-foot-tall by 200-foot-long retaining wall.”

Hittie says such capabilities show owners right from the start that his company is pushing the envelope—and keep his firm from losses on overbidding. The detailed information provided by drones helps with brownfield projects as well, because drone surveys can easily verify that the site conditions are as stipulated in the company’s contracts.

Communication with owner-operators

Drone surveys continue to keep communications between EPCs and owners transparent and well-documented throughout the duration of a project. Nino Efendić, with the drone company Aerial Prospex, explained in the 2025 ABC Field Tech Report how drone data decisively resolved an expensive dispute between a contractor and owner.

The project required cutting back a hillside and building a foundation with fill. As work began, the contractor’s drones flew over the site daily and calculated how much would need to be cut and filled. Within the first week, the drone data revealed that the stone base was deeper than expected and the work would far exceed the original estimate. The contractor asked the owner whether they’d like to proceed with the more expensive project, and the owner replied: Keep working and we’ll tell you when to stop.

For months, construction continued, with drones sharing progress photos with the owner and engineer every day of the quantities and movements of earth and fill. After costs climbed to half a million dollars, the owner began to push back and refused to release payments over the original quarter-million-dollar estimate. But, faced with a comprehensive daily record of geotagged drone data, the owner had to honor the work completed and pay in full.

Inventory and asset management

Drone data on volumetric measurements of materials on site also lets EPCs verify that they have the right assets on hand and aren’t being overcharged without workers having to manually tour sites measuring piles of gravel.

Drones can fly over a site and calculate how many tons of rock are in a pile and determine whether procurement needs to order more. In one instance, Hittie says a drone measured the outline of a stone delivery and determined the company had been charged for more stone than had actually been delivered—a difference of about $20,000.  

Worksite safety and compliance 

Drone fly-throughs of worksites can also keep workers safe and ensure that contractors are complying with safety regulations. DroneDeploy, one of the major providers of construction drones in the U.S., offers software called “Safety AI.” A drone captures thousands of images of a worksite each week, and then an AI analyzes them to identify all visible United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) hazards, ranks them according to severity and automatically notifies the safety team.

Drones can also save workers from undertaking inspections of areas that are difficult to reach or otherwise hazardous, such as roofs, bridges and unstable structures. Balfour Beatty uses drones to inspect bridges over waterways.

Both high-resolution cameras and other sensors let site managers inspect structures from a distance and determine what skills, materials and tools workers will need before sending them to do repairs or additional work. Drone images also document inspections, so everyone is on the same page about what has been found and what needs to be done.

All the while, drones ensure that they keep everyone on site safe by staying out of the way. Recently, engineers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a machine-learning algorithm that helps drones avoid the moving people, machinery and other obstacles they’re likely to encounter flying around an active construction site.

Handoff and ongoing maintenance

Drones are also benefiting owner-operators as well as EPCs. Canada’s largest builder, PCL, uses drones to capture the as-built condition of slabs and utilities. It also uses them to conduct (and document) high-resolution façade inspections for a fraction of the time and cost it would take to conduct manually. 

On handoff, PCL can transfer those as-built inspections to owners, along with a 360 photographic walkthrough of the project, all of which owners can then use to help with maintenance and future renovations.

That comprehensive documentation also ensures that EPCs and owners have an objective record of precisely what condition a project was in at handoff, so as to minimize disputes down the line. As DroneDeploy says, “Owners trust what they can see.”

Alex Ramirez, Director of Construction Technology at PCL, says, “Once clients see what they can get—whether it’s a 360 capture or a drone flight that captures the whole essence of the site—they get super excited.”