HIGHWAYS: NHAI is set to map a large part of the Indian road network using drones.
National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has decided to map the entire length of the road under construction across the country using drone videography. This comes after Nitin Gadkari announced his plan to almost triple the road construction target from 16.61 km per day (in 2015–16) to 45 km per day in (2018–19).
Executive Summary
Total 20,000 km was approved under National Highways Development Project (NHDP) Phase IV, out of which 14,799 km was assigned to NHAI and remainder to Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH). Moreover, even the NHDP Phase III, where approx. 12000 km was approved is yet to be complete. To meet the ambitious target of 45 km per day, NHAI has taken the bold step of mapping the entire road length under construction. This is done to not only track the progress of the existing projects but also to plan for the upcoming projects efficiently. For this, they have classified the country into seven zones where Indshine has grabbed the two zones (Zone I and Zone V) for drone mapping. Zone I comprises of the seven sisters in the North-East while Zone V comprises of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa, Daman & Diu. A minimum total of 6000 km is to be mapped every 6 months.
Challenges/Problems
The whole team believes in the power of drones but nobody had the faintest idea as to how many challenges we might have to face during execution. Some of the challenges that we have assumed based on our past experience are as follows:
- Rough and hilly terrain makes it difficult to fly the usual drones.
- Obtaining permissions from sensitive areas of North-East or Maharashtra and Karnataka.
- Safety issues in case of drone crash.
- The target to do the highways mapping is 60–70 km per day.
- NHAI wants all the required data within one week of operations.
Solutions
We have already an experience of mapping more than 5000 km of railways and highways. Earlier, we procured drones from the market which seemed cheap and easier to handle. However, because of this, we did not have much control over the ins and outs of the operations, making it difficult to make the processes too efficient.
Therefore, we made our custom drones — hexacopter as well as quadcopter. Hexacopter is a type of drone that has six wings/rotors whereas quadcopter had 4 wings. Now, due to the flexibility in our customised drones, we increased the flight time (flight time: total time which a drone can fly without changing its batteries) from 20 minutes to 50 minutes, and eliminated most of the redundant & unnecessary tasks.
Thus, we were able to increase our operational mapping capacity from 25 km per day to 70 km per day.
Here’s an image of the quadcopter that we use for the aerial monitoring or mapping of highways and railways.
For hilly terrains where the roads are in a convoluted shape, the usual drones are extremely difficult to handle as they are not capable of maintaining the speed and accuracy at sharp turns. Often, the drones crash.
On the contrary, our quadcopter can turn like a pro even at sharpest of turns. Also, it is capable of maintaining a constant height above the changing terrains, also referred to as its terrain-following ability. This helps to produce a seamless output in the aerial mapping to be delivered to the client.
Coming over the safety issues of drones, we have taken various measures to ensure the complete safety issues such as:
- Our drones go through iterative design and simulation processes making them capable of working smoothly even in harsh conditions of high wind speed and rainfall.
- Additionally, they are capable of detecting objects, thus preventing any potential collision with the surroundings (especially helpful in hilly areas or in case of high towers).
- There is a remote controller with a screen where the drone pilot monitors the smooth flying of drones (drones are mounted with downward and front-facing cameras). Therefore, if at any time, there’s unnecessary vibrations or GPS loss or heavy rain, the pilot can enable “Return to Home” mode which means the drone will automatically come back to the place where it started its flight from.
Conclusion
To achieve the highway construction target of 45 km per day, the plan to monitor the construction progress throughout India using drones is an audacious and an intelligent plan. And, Indshine is very well positioned to help NHAI in achieving its target. Let’s look at a sample aerial video shot by drone for a client PNC Infratech Private Limited.
About Indshine
Indshine provides geospatial insights and design solutions for Highways, Railways, Mining, Forestry, and Power Transmission. We also create digital maps and 3D models by capturing data through drones, satellites and LiDARs. These are widely used in smart city planning, surveying of a given site, monitoring the site progress, and inspecting various kinds of structures such as bridges, dams, pipelines, high walls, etc.
Moreover, based on the industry’s requirements, we have developed a project collaboration platform called Felix (felix.indshine.com) which allows all the stakeholders to visualise the area of interest, generate spatial insights, discuss with other members, and make informed decisions quickly.
For more information, kindly send us an email at info@indshine.com or visit www.indshine.com.
