Developing Standard Resources for Accelerating Maturation of Drone-Based Transportation-Related Data Collection
Using drone technology for the collection of road transportation data offers many advantages over traditional methods of data collection and such techniques have become feasible alternatives to traditional methods. Drone-based data collection is cheaper, safer, faster, and more accurate than manual data collection in most cases. It also allows for the collection of accurate data previously unavailable or difficult to obtain, such as for alternative intersections or complex geometries.
Beyond the ease of acquisition, the form of data collected via drones (namely, videographic and photographic) enables analysts to take advantage of new suites of machine vision software to quantitatively and systematically extract relevant traffic and geometric parameters using the many affordable commercial machine vision services available on the market for quick and accurate data processing. Collecting data with drones on a routine basis that can be so easily processed adds value for DOTs by creating a repository of historic transportation activity data that can be used to validate activity models, track system performance across time, and solve countless transportation-related problems.
A primary barrier to adoption of routine transportation data collection by drone identified by the team is the general lack of guidance on how to use drones for such purposes and on how to analyze the collected data effectively. While drones are used increasingly often in a growing number of ways, the technology is still relatively new and has not yet reached full maturity. While there is no one roadmap for implementing drone systems for data collection by DOTs, making available resources to accelerate the maturation of drone-based data collection tools and techniques would accelerate adoption by improving knowledge transfer between researchers and agencies.
GDOT and the STRIDE UTC have positioned themselves as leaders in the utilization of drone technology for solving transportation problems via the conduction of several innovative research projects utilizing drone data collection and analysis techniques (e.g., Gbologah et al 2022; Rodgers et al 2023). Leveraging the experiences of the research team gained through those projects, this project sought to accelerate knowledge transfer by producing documentation of innovative drone data collection and analysis methods in the form of standard operating procedures and a demonstration of the real-world value of those methods in a case study. This project also produced a series of training resources to be used to train personnel, accelerating the integration and growth of innovative drone-based data collection activity.