Get in the drone zone

By Emma Peterson. 

From collecting data to organizing and examining findings, Eagleview Assess can help you at every stage of the roof inspection process. 

Recently, Allan York, the senior vice president of construction and solar businesses at Eagleview stopped by The Coffee Shops™ for an interview about Eagleview Assess. Assess is a product program from Eagleview that connects contractors with drones and drone technology that they can easily incorporate into their roofing operations. Using drones can help contractors in a variety of ways, but one of the biggest areas of its utilization is roof inspections.  

Allan shared a bit about how Assess drones can help you perform accurate roof assessments. He explained, “They’ve been programmed and designed specifically to fly around single-family residences.  You put in the address that you want it to fly, the app will tell you whether there’s flight restrictions and if you’re good, all you have to do is push a button. The drone will go up about 60 feet above the structure in question and create a flight plan on the screen that is viewable on your tablet.” From there, users can adjust the perimeter they want the drone to fly, and, when ready, it will begin scanning the roof in six-foot increments. Before you know it, the drone will be automatically returning itself to its base and your first phase of roof inspection, data collection, is complete. 

This is where the second phase begins, which is the organization of that data. For contractors who use Eagleview Assess, this next step is efficiently handled within the Assess platform. Allan explained, “We take those images from the drone, and we sew them together in the Assess software platform. So, as a contractor, you will look at the roof in Assess and it looks like the complete roof.” This allows you to look at the entire roof closely and carefully without leaving the safety of the ground.  

And for the third phase of inspection — identifying problem areas — not only can you use the created image of the roof to investigate for yourself, Eagleview Assess will also apply machine learning to help you. Allan explained, “We apply machine learning to those images. And we recently bolstered the power of that to not just pick out any anomaly, but to detect what type of anomaly it is, whether it's mechanical or whether it's from a hail strike or whether it's from a wind situation.”  

Learn more about Eagleview Assess and how it can improve your roof inspections!