Construction company finds many uses for drone
RACINE COUNTY – Bukacek Construction’s new piece of equipment looks like a toy, flies like a helicopter and saves lots of money.
The drone that Bukacek bought in August was in use recently at River Bend Nature Center, 3600 N. Green Bay Road, where the company is building the Sam and Gene Johnson Pavilion.
Pavilion project manager John Rybak held the controller with one thumb on each of the small joysticks. With complete assurance he could make the drone hover, rotate, pan up and down, and land so softly in the parking lot that it would barely have left an imprint had the surface been mud instead of asphalt.
Four plastic propellers lift the X-shaped, plastic drone, which is just 9 inches tall and 24 inches wide, propeller tip to propeller tip. Powered by an electric motor, the drone weighs nine pounds, but the bulk of that is the
battery.
“They look recreational,” Bukacek CEO Jim Cairns observed.
While the drone was aloft at the pavilion site, Rybak used its bottom-mounted camera to take both high-definition still pictures and video of the work site. On his smartphone mounted atop the controller, he watched what the camera was seeing from aloft and clicked to capture a photo or start recording a video.
Because of the proximity of Batten International Airport to River Bend, Rybak made sure to keep the drone no higher than necessary to survey the work site. Another consideration is wind; the drone can only fly on a fairly calm day.
But at a cost of about $2,000 – Bukacek bought it via Amazon.com – the drone has been a terrific investment for Bukacek, Cairns said. Clients like to see the progress on their projects, and the drone is a very cost-effective way to provide them with high-quality images.
Bukacek sometimes mounts cameras at different vantage points at a project to allow the client to watch the progress, Cairns said.
But about the only way to get bird’s-eye-view images such as what the drone can provide was hiring a pilot and aircraft. Rybak said that cost about $600 each time. Three drone flights nearly pays back its purchase cost, he remarked.
Other uses
The drone can do more than compile a project photo history, Cairns pointed out. When Bukacek built a new soccer field for The Prairie School this year, the project included new LED lighting.
“We took (the drone) out at night to see if the illumination of the field was even,” Cairns said: looking for spillage where light was not wanted, and “hot spots” that were too bright. Even with careful planning there can be a variance between what’s expected and what happens, he said.
“We’re starting to see new uses,” said Josh Johnson, a senior project estimator for Bukacek.
For example, a drone can even be used to pick up, carry and place materials in hard-to-reach places, Bukacek employees said.
And it can be very, very smart. The drone has built-in protection against being lost out of sight because of a sapped battery, Rybak explained. Each time the drone is used, the operator can set a new home base. If the drone’s battery runs down below about 20 percent, it will switch to autopilot, fly home, hover and then softly land.
“I think it’ll prove to be a very useful tool,” Cairns said. “We’re kind of excited about it.”
