UNC 2022: Failure to use drones costs the public sector millions

– As early as 2020, we focused on this through the Bedre Flyt conference. Now we are doing it again to increase cooperation with the public sector, says Anders Martinsen, CEO of UAS Norway.

UAS Norway is organizing the Nordics’ largest drone conference, UNC 2022, in Kristiansand 21 – 23 November.

– This time we are not satisfied with just saying that we will take pictures with a drone, but we will help them to put together the right data and how to reuse old data, Martinsen says.

Important meeting place

UNC 2022 will be an important meeting place where participants can learn from what others have done.

– Now the industry has gone from test to operation, and we will show off services where drones have value and where it is smart for the public sector to use this tool.

Participants from the public sector will gain a unique insight into today’s opportunities at UNC 2022.

– We want to focus on the needs of the future, and help people very quickly to get started and take out profits. We do want this to be a conference where we just tells that it can be done, we will show how.

This takes place through eight work shops, all of which run twice, meaning that the participants get the opportunity to take part in several of these.

The list of work shops includes both building inspection, inspection of critical infrastructure, underwater inspection and indoor inspection with drones.

Drones «a gift package» for Statsbygg

Statsbygg is probably the public agency that has best started using drones. The agency began a major drone project in 2020 when contracts of up to 54 million were signed for building inspections with drones in the areas east, south, center and north. In addition, they have their own internal drone organization which mainly operates in the west.

– This has been a gift package, with pleasant and positive gains that we hadn’t even thought about when we started, Mai Anh Thị Lê, special advisor and head of Statsbygg’s work related to Smart Property Management, previously told Dronemagasinet.

Statsbygg’s starting point was that the use of drones should optimize ten percent of the standardized operational tasks, but it turned out to be much more.

Compared to previous manual inspections, more deviations per property have been uncovered with the drone.

Lê also states that the costs of a drone inspection are far lower than inspecting roofs and facades using scaffolding or a lift.

– If everything goes according to plan, drone inspections of approximately 700 buildings will be planned and carried out. Estimated cost is approximately NOK three million. The estimated cost if we were to do this manually is seven million. There is thus a difference of approximately four million in profit by carrying out drone inspections, she says.