DEME Partners with Airobot for UAV Monitoring
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DEME Partners with Airobot for UAV Monitoring

DEME, a leading Belgian dredging, hydraulic engineering and environmental solutions group, provides solutions for global challenges such as overpopulation in coastal areas, increasing seaborne trade and the rising global demand for energy and strategic resources. The company is now teaming up with Airobot to use UAVs for digital terrain modelling.

DEME is considering UAVs to improve the safety of their crews on the construction sites, said Lorentz Lievens, head of the survey department. To create digital terrain models, the land surveyors must work amongst continuously operating bulldozers, excavators and dumper trucks. On several sites it is not possible at all to use traditional land survey techniques, for example on recently reclaimed land. To remove them from hazard, the company would like to create the DTMs by using drones, Lievens added.

Additionally, the offshore wind division is looking for a solution to inspect the foundations of the offshore wind turbines for corrosion. Today this is done manually using rope teams, which is not efficient and inherently unsafe. UAVs are a good potential alternative.

Airobot supports DEME to select and evaluate the state-of-the-art unmanned technology, commented Jan Leyssens, managing director at Airobot. Together with DEME, the Xena-1 from Altigator has been selected to which Airobot adds their own collision avoidance technology and centimetre accurate GNSS receivers from Septentrio. Airobot also assists DEME to integrate the UAVs into their operations and organised the pilot training.

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