[10]Komatsu, the Japanese builder, has produced autonomous vehicles for major mining and construction sites around the globe [11]. Now, they are combining their autonomous vehicles with drones to become more productive and accurate in their site work. They use the drones to survey the site in less than a day where manual methods took as long as two weeks. Not only are the new technologies more productive, they are more accurate and able to eliminate the 20-30% errors found in the manual survey work that many of us grew up with.

The 6-minute video below from Cnet [12] explains how Komatsu has taken the next step by using the drones in concert with their heavy equipment to produce more accurate and more productive site work on their client’s construction projects.

I suspect that agencies like the Texas Department of Transportation [13] might be seeing more of this advanced technology on their major projects in the near future.