French-headquartered construction group VINCI has gradually been expanding the use of drones as tools across various business activities.

At Eurovia, drones are used in quarries to carry out topographic surveys and measure reserves and storage volumes. For example, Granulats Vicat uses drones to substantially increase the frequency of its assessments of progress and physical stocks at its production sites. According to VINCI, drones also ensure greater safety for the teams, since they can be used to carry out measurements in areas that are otherwise difficult to access.

At VINCI Energies, OMEXOM uses drones on its power line worksites. During HV and VHV power line maintenance work, drones are employed to observe the condition of towers and insulator chains. They provide a less costly initial visual assessment that improves the availability of structures for operators by reducing the frequency of outages.  They also generate productivity gains, improve worksite preparation and enhance safety by identifying high-risk areas.

The drones are equipped with high-definition cameras and thermal imaging cameras to help civil engineering and building specialists determine the condition of high-rise buildings and perform thermal audits.

VINCI Construction also regularly uses drones to supplement helicopters in photography and video production. On the SEA Tours Bordeaux HSL project, for example, 360° observation by drone has been introduced on the Ambarès-et-Lagrave and Dordogne Viaduct worksites.

Nymphea (VINCI Construction) also operates marine drones. Developed as an autonomous vehicle, the RSV operates several surveillance and measuring systems without standard nautical equipment of boats and crews. The lightweight remote survey vehicle incorporates navigation, communication and data acquisition tools in waterproof portable modules and is used to work efficiently on all types of sites, even the most difficult, and to transmit data instantaneously over distances that can exceed 5 km.