Caltrans saved $100K on a single bridge inspection
2026年5月1日
From Otay Mesa to the Coronado Bridge, Caltrans is scaling what drone operations can do.
At Otay Mesa, Skydio Dock for X10 tracks construction progress remotely, measuring earth moved, detecting changes, and reducing site visits. What used to take crews hours can now be done across multiple sites in a single day.
At the Coronado Bridge, one 20-minute X10 flight replaced a week of manual inspection, saving over $100K on a single mission.
This is Scalable Operations and Advanced Remote Technologies (SOAR) initiative in action: proving drones can move from pilot programs to everyday infrastructure operations.
- I think we're finally through the technology curve of going like hey is this
- possible and is this repeatable? I think we can say yes. Now the step is like
- institutionalizing that. If you want to stop and then just send real quick, it
- 's
- really easy to do. We are about 3,000 feet from the border right there. This is
- the new Port of Entry facility. The existing Port of Entry facility right now I
- believe is the busiest truck entry and exit port in the United States and this
- facility is going to serve to kind of relieve some of the pressure on that.
- We have our Gen 2 dock which is technically our first site that we deployed
- for SOAR. The entire setup is portable so that entire thing isn't plugged into
- anything. It's completely off-grid and the beauty of the design is it works in
- any circumstance whether it's in town or rural. The same container can go from
- job site to job site. What we're doing here is a lot of video type missions
- just
- documented construction site progress. We can do two different subsequent
- flights
- and then we can do a change detection between those two. We can compare digital
- terrain models and then now we can have pretty darn accurate volume metrics for
- how much dirt did the contractor move this month. Having that drone work and
- capability to be able to fly one is great and now we're getting to this new
- curve of technology to be able to start flying remotely. We're really going to
- be
- able to help out when it comes to the workflow and just be able to get things
- done. Usually it takes closer an hour and getting all the equipment ready,
- getting
- the plan ready, having the crew start to mobilize and now when it comes out to
- hear everything's set up everything's ready to go. I think that's really the
- game-changer here is that he could hypothetically run eight sites in one
- day and do the collection on that so employing tools like this that are
- forced multipliers is really beneficial. Right now we're standing on Coronado
- Island. Obviously it's restricted airspace. The advances that we have in
- some of the capabilities that the X-10 unlock for us with the ADSB in and the
- ability for it to do visual navigation we got an approval on this one. Several
- projects that we have into the development process. The big one that's
- high-profile is a suicide prevention project. The request kind of was hey we
- could really use video along the railing along the entire structure so they can
- design the anchor points to attach the netting structure. How we were gonna do
- that was gonna take at least a week. At night with lane closures hang a snooper
- over with the lighting apparatus and a camera. The second flight we did with
- the
- dock we completed that mission. We sent them the video they said well this is
- perfect this is everything we needed we can cancel that contract. So all things
- consider for a 20-minute drone flight to save over a hundred thousand dollars
- is
- huge. Something that we're really focusing on in being able to capture
- these peers is using this oblique kind of a map scan around it. It's one thing
- to
- have plans, blueprints, whatever you want to call it but to actually have
- something that was measured in the field that you can take digital measurements
- from it just makes it that much easier to be able to work with. The freedom
- that
- we had to be able to launch a drone come up with a plan fly it as opposed to
- get
- three to five person crew lug out a lot more survey equipment. Figure out the
- water vessel and I really have no idea any sort of permissions and things like
- that that we'd have to do to get to every single peer. It's kind of about
- pushing the boundaries on what we think these tools can do and that's kind of
- the whole premise of SOAR right is push the boundaries of technology come up
- with the playbooks about others can take what we've done learn from it and
- actually go to immediate deployment.
Watch Time
3 Mins 45 Secs