In June 2017 in the port of Zeebrugge (Belgium), we surveyed a 40 ha area in order to asses the precise quantity of soil that needs to be excavated for the construction of the new quay wall.

This orange zone of 1.1km by 350m has been surveyed in 1.5 hours. A 3D model of the terrain was then generated after a few hours (usually one night).

Why did we use a drone for this survey? Even if the survey price is the same, the amount of generated data is way higher. Indeed instead of taking a control point every few meters,  a point cloud with spacial resolution of 5 cm was generated. This means that we are able to get a much better estimation of the amount of soil to excavate and thus better prepare the tender.

The goal of the mission was to compute the amount of soil to be excavated. Therefore an extra information piece is needed: the 3D model of the design levels. These models were generated by the BIM team following the 2D plans of the quay wall design. Finally, the design 3D model and the surveyed situation 3D model were compared to compute the quantity of soil to remove.

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The accuracy of the measurements is about the same as a classical RTK survey system : cm-level positioning accuracy.