Hammer? Check. Drill? Check. Saw? Check. Drone?

Though not traditionally thought of as a tool used for construction, companies in the industry are starting to rely on drones for scanning abilities. Manitoba Construction Sector Council (MCSC) is working to ensure that it continues to grow in the province.

To do so, they’ve been partnering with two other organizations – New Media Manitoba, the province’s sector council for information communications and digital technologies, and Critical Ops, a company committed to helping businesses use technology like remote sensing services to keep moving forward. Both have already been involved in delivering the SkySkills drone training program in Manitoba, and a new course will grow on that by incorporating LiDAR remote sensing technology and extended reality through video game software Unreal Engine.

The combination of the technologies provides the ability to scan a site and make plans, whether for materials and costs, or for safety and incident management. Those are things that can already be done, of course, but with the scanning technology through drones and LiDAR, the data is becoming more accurate, and work that would normally take days to do can now be done in hours or minutes.

Republic Architecture Inc., a Winnipeg-based firm, is one company using the scanning technology already. They do a lot of work with heritage buildings and existing structures, and using drone-driven scans has been a game-changer for them.

“The best example we have is from an extensive fish lab renovation in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia,” said Sean Usher, Director of Design Technology and Innovation at Republic Architecture. “We scanned the site after the building was demolished. We brought that condition into our 3D modeling, and our team examined the model in detail and identified things we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. We could deal with issues the contractor would have found and then required input from us to act on, meaning they didn’t have to burn time and money on the site. The contractor even commented that they’d never had a set of documents that were so accurate – within a sixteenth of an inch to where the actual building and existing conditions were.”

MCSC wants to see more stories like that unfold through this technology.

To facilitate that, New Media Manitoba, MCSC and Critical Ops will deliver courses that will see 60 people trained in drone flying and LiDAR technology over the next three years.

“LiDAR becomes very helpful in terms of detection and ranging,” said Chelsea Treboniak, President of Critical Ops. “Construction companies can scan a piece of property full of foliage and vegetation and pull that away very quickly so that they can plan and make volumetric assessments. The assessments are of survey quality so that companies can mitigate any changes to orders, be highly precise on measurements, and can order materials off of those estimates.”

The training course will consist of three modules covered over three days and will make use of New Media Manitoba’s Studio Lab xR, a 5,550-square foot facility at Portage and Main with abilities for virtual production, performance capture, projection mapping, and Unreal Engine. Participants will start by learning what LiDAR is and the basics of drone flying, before going into extended reality, experiencing a drone flight mission, and working through several scenarios with captured data.

Though there are challenges to implement this kind of technology, Treboniak ensures it is worth the investment.

“Companies can get scared because the technology is expensive, and then finding the people that can operate it, what their titles are, and what their career path and progression looks like is still evolving,” noted Treboniak. “Once that takes shape, companies that have kept up with it will be light years ahead of everybody else and have monstrous opportunities.”

That’s a statement Usher and Republic Architecture Inc. can already attest to.

“I’ve never met a professional in our industry who has used a drone or a scanner and said it was a bad idea,” noted Usher. “We’re a 3-D environment firm thanks to these scans, but we often receive 2-D computer-aided design (CAD) files with natural inaccuracies in those hand-drawn documents. CAD documents can only be as accurate as the person creating them. Scanning removes all of that. It’s brought a lot of confidence to our renovation and restoration.

Learn more on Feb. 25, 2025 at the Meetup

MCSC’s SkySkills team will share more about its upcoming LiDAR drone training at New Media Manitoba (NMM) Women in Tech Meetup on Feb. 25, 2025. Click HERE to register or to learn more about the event. MCSC’s SkySkills drone training, in partnership with NMM is currently developing LiDAR drone training, which will be rolled out in 2025.