A.T. Drone Services

ATDS specializes in two wildly different sectors: Architect, Engineer, and Contractor (AEC) building projects and Plant Health Care (PHC) assessments and monitoring.

Our mission is to empower customers by utilizing cutting-edge Terrestrial and drone technology so they can make informed decisions quickly while maintaining cost efficiency. With our commitment to excellence, we strive towards a vision where managing data acquisition processes are seamless across industries— allowing us to create real impact for everyone involved!

Types of Services

Building Scans for BIM Integration

Existing Structures or In-Construction Progress

Architects and Engineers

For Architects and Engineers, historically the workflow for gathering as-built conditions of an existing building is to send a team of architects or engineers to site armed with notepads, cameras, and measuring tapes and spend the better part of a day or two collecting data. Those same people come back to the office and have to manually input that information into their computer and create a BIM model or 2D CAD from scratch. That equates to 30 to 50 man hours of work for your project, which is still likely to have human error. That time doesn’t include the site revisits to capture the data you missed the first time.

The measuring tape and note pad method is old school and going the way of eraser guards and drafting tables! You’re using a 21st century BIM program to model your existing structures………why not use 21st century data collection methods?!?

A commercial grade drone unit can fly over and around your existing structure and capture high resolution images at varying heights and angles from the top down. We integrate that overhead model with a terrestrial point cloud and produce a complete top to bottom inside to outside model of your project!

Autodesk REVIT or Graphsoft ArchiCAD. Whether you use REVIT or ArchiCAD we got you covered! We have a workflow from field capture through processing.

Integration with Matterport. If your team is already using Matterport in-house we can still scan the exterior for you! ATDS can provide a more accurate digital double at a fraction of the time your 2-person team takes to field collect this data and then go back and convert those field notes into a useable model. If your team does use Matterport, and you can get ATDS the .e57 file from Matterport we can merge our drone model with the .e57 and return to you a complete interior and exterior model!

General Contractors

Are you renovating a large structure and need to double-check those siding or roofing take-offs during pre-con? Is your project owner or design team located out of town?

We can assist with material take-off measurements as a belt & suspenders check before you order that siding or roofing material.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, surely a digital double is worth a million! We can provide construction progress photos and models of the interior & exterior of your project from start to finish.

Land & Forestry Mapping | Plant Health Care

Tree Removal Permits. More and more municipalities in Western Colorado want to protect and maintain their town or city character. This means they want to weigh in on whether or not you truly need to remove that 90-ft fir tree in your front yard. Tree care companies either put someone in a cherry picker or have an arborist climb the tree to get a full understanding of the trees health. Cherry pickers are expensive and take up a lot of room. Putting a human on-rope to climb a tree requires specific training and puts someone in danger working at-height. ATDS can fly around this tree(s) with their multispectral drone unit and capture high resolution images and better assess the overall health of the subject tree.

Tree health and maintenance programs. Do you manage the tree canopy care contract for a municipality or large ranch? Does it take your tree health care team a day to walk or drive a 200-acre ranch to look at every tree, get tree counts, take measurements on tree crowns? Once we go to processing we get you an exact tree count, look at individual and overall tree health, and even give you tree crown information.

Let’s talk artificial intelligence (AI). It’s all the buzz right now. ATDS stays on top of drone agriculture technology weekly. Currently, drone agriculture software cannot differentiate between tree species, but we are reading that as AI gets “smarter” it will be able to not only give tree counts and crown diameters, but tree species counts as well. We’re not sure if that’s 6 months or 2 years, but it’s coming!! And ATDS will be on the leading edge to bring that to our clients.

Real Estate photos and video

While our “bread and butter” is Reality Capture and Scan-to-BIM services we are occasionally asked to take real estate photos. ATDS can certainly assist with these services. Give us a call and we’ll chat!

multispectral view of a cluster of trees on DJI remote control

High resolution overview of suburban tree canopy

Multispectral aerial view golf course turf health

view of multistory building in Glenwood Springs, CO

Macro view multispectral map of suburban area

Overview and tree count of suburban area

The Tech We Use

We use the latest commercial-grade Terrestrial and drone scanning equipment to capture data in the field. On certain projects, we will set ground control with an GNSS receiver to geolocate our project and ensure we achieve the best data accuracy as possible.

Once in the office, we utilize a combination of software packages to process our field data. All of the computer processing is done on our purpose-built desktop computer. This ensures we can crunch the vast amounts of data in a time-efficient manner and pass that time/cost efficiency to our clients.

The combination of a drone and land-based terrestrial scanner allows us to capture an entire structure and provide our client with a highly detailed complete model.