Drone technology is not commonplace within housing organisations, yet this technology has the capacity to deliver better value, better quality data and be more time efficient than traditional methods. Connected Places DINLabs want to explore why this technology remains relatively unknown and understand how and where it can be better used in housing.

Drone technology in other sectors has been shown to

- reduce costs,

- eliminate practices that carry a greater risk (e.g. working at heights, inspecting buildings that are difficult to access),

- increased monitoring and surveying of buildings and estates due to reduced cost leading to cheaper preventative rather than more expensive reactive maintenance

- support delivery of Net Zero including thermal imaging

This DINLab will be a mixture of demonstrating technology proven across a number of industry sectors and creating a blueprint for what an educated client for drone technology implementation would need.

- How drone technology can be used across housing organisations and what geographical and site locations, archetypes, and stock densities work

- How repair and maintenance needs of a building can be flagged through images and high-quality videos

- The thermal imaging of a building and how it can support the delivery of net zero

- How 2D and 3D images/ models can be used in the organisation

- What an educated client would need to know for procuring drones, meeting regulation and compliance, creating a drone strategy and business case and completing a drone readiness toolkit.

Who is the DINLab for?

This Connected Places DINLab is designed for organisations that:

- Believe there is huge potential to improve efficiency and cost savings by integrating drones into existing workflows

- Are interested to develop an understanding of how the rich data captured can enhance business decisions and intelligence

- Have the ambition to develop a drone strategy and business case to deploy their use across the portfolio of assets

- Learn and share with like-minded providers

What is a DINLab?

A DINLab is our innovation platform to rapidly test, learn and evaluate new services and solutions with start-ups, early-stage growth and new market entrants.

For many organisations, being able to fully participate in prototyping and proof of concept trials with new products or solutions is not always possible on their own, either due to lack of resources, experience, or financial issues. DINLabs offers you the opportunity to collaborate together as a group of providers to build, test and learn at speed from some of the very best new technologies and organisational design processes

So if you would like to learn more about what this experiment will involve, the method, the resources, the data requirements and the costs then please reserve your place and we will do our best to answer your questions and see if this is the right approach for your organisation.