Roof Inspection Drones

Traditionally, humans are required to climb onto roofs to conduct inspections. These high up workplaces present a risk to employees that has to be mitigated by the Employer.  These mitigation include the provision of safety equipment, safety harnesses and scaffolding to protect the employee from falling.  Beside the risk to the employee, all of this safety equipment is expensive and if you have to hire a crane you will need a wallet full of cash.

Roof Inspections

At other sites, the roof may have a safety platform or walkway on the roof.  Yes, the employee can take images from the platform but they cannot walk across that roof without all the safety gear.

As an Employer, why not mitigate these risks and reduce costs by using Aerial Hotshots Drones to do the Roof Inspection.  This leaves all your personnel safely on the ground or confined to safety platforms or walkways.

Drones are an ideal alternative to conduct Roof Inspections and they can save clients time, money, produce better imagery and help our client make an informed decision.

Aerial Hotshots drones can quickly capture the damaged areas and provide the evidence in the form of high-resolution video and photographs.

You cannot get this kind of overall perspective from a workman with a camera standing on a roof but with a Drone you can.

Our Inspection Drone

Whilst Aerial Hotshots has a number of Drones we use the DJI S800 EVO  for inspections.

This drone is a 2 person operation consisting of a pilot and camera operator.  The pilot positions the aircraft and flies the inspection whilst the camera operator pans and tilts the camera to capture points of interest from different angles..  With a flick of a switch the camera operator can change from capturing images to video.

This drone:

  • Is fitted with a Sony Nex 6 Camera (16 megapixel),
  • Has a 3 axis Camera gimbal that allows 360 pan & tilt.
  • Can alternate between images and video during flight.

Flying Inspection Jobs – Not All Sites are Suitable

Some job sites are not suitable for Drones due to its sites size, height, shape, onsite or nearby obstructions.

This is because LEGALLY we must be able to maintain Line of Sight (LOS) whilst the Drone is flying.  We must be able to see it to fly it!!

On some sites we can take-off and land at multiple locations to maintain line of sight.

We do a site safety assessment to determine whether we can legally and safely do the job.

The Drone would be flown between 1 – 2 metres above the roof surface during the inspection providing we can maintain line of sight at all times.

Important Note

Legally, we cannot  fly within 30 metres of people or above or over them at any height as this is hazardous and poses an unreasonable risk of injury should a fault or failure occur with the Drone.

Example Imagery

Example 1

In the below example all personnel remained on the safety platform/walkway and the Drone did the hard work flying across, around structures and above the roof to capture imagery.

Example 2

In the below example, ALL personnel remained on the ground whilst the drone did the hard work.

Example 3

This is a just a quick Demo of Video capture quality from our S800 EVO Drone. If this was a normal job we would fly slower and closer to the roof.

Thermal Imagery

Aerial Hotshots is currently working on a project to mount a FLIR Thermal Imagery Camera onto our Drone.

This Camera will be able to capture both thermal images and video and will further assist our clients to make informed decisions.

Please contact us if you would like to know more about this project.