sing UAV-generated Visual Contents to Assess the Risk Perception of Safety Managers on a Construction Site

Abstract

To prevent the occurrence of accidents and incidents, safety planning and monitoring plays an important role in the construction industry. These activities are developed by the safety manager who is the person in charge of guaranteeing and managing the safety program. Despite its importance, these are conducted separately from the construction stage and require a large amount of manual effort to gather information. In addition, they are limited by the safety manager’s risk perception of what safety measures are required to prevent accidents. One of the tools utilized for capturing visual information of the construction project faster and more efficiently is the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which is a type of aircraft designed to operate without a human pilot onboard. A UAV can be deployed to send visual information (e.g., photos and videos) of the job site and can access specifically inaccessible, hard-to-reach, or unsafe locations on the site. This type of visual information can be transformed through a photogrammetry process into point cloud data (PCD) and then can be used to generate an accurate 3D model of a site providing very detailed and comprehensive views of a project site. In this case study, we focus on comparing the content generated by UAVs (including photos, videos, and 3D models) and the content utilized by traditional methods (plans and schedules) and how these methods can affect the risk perception of safety managers. After this, we created a new method for planning and monitoring the safety in construction projects that incorporates the UAV into the earliest stages of the process. A comparison between the UAV-based safety monitoring process and the traditional method was conducted in a case study in Chile, and the risk perception of safety managers using both methods was evaluated. The study concluded that the use of UAVs allows for the identification of more hazards and increases the safety managers’ perception of the severity, probability, and risk level of hazards on site.