Road corridors don't fit a square aerial photo. They're long, linear, chainage-driven and full of features that matter at sub-metre scale. Drone LiDAR captures the full corridor envelope — formation, batters, drainage, structures, services and vegetation — in continuous, geo-referenced detail, ready to feed straight into design and maintenance workflows.
Cuts, fills, culverts and bridge approaches all share one continuous capture. Each chainage drops a cross-section against the design with the engineering annotations a designer actually works from — formation width, batter slope, structure clearance, drainage geometry.
Cut through ridge. Road grade drops below natural surface. Symmetrical cut batters with table drains either side; surface water flows away from the formation.
Corridors are linear, long and feature-dense. The conventional response — string-line survey, chainage GPS, manual cross-sections — does not scale, and the gaps it leaves are exactly the gaps that drive scope creep at the design and tender stages.
Cross-sections every 20 m on a 10 km corridor is 500 sections — and 9.5 km of un-sectioned road in between. Drainage features, batter changes and ground variation between stations enter the design as guesswork.
Working a live road corridor means lane closures, traffic control plans and permitted hours. Each capture pass adds cost, time and risk before the first measurement is taken.
Photogrammetric corridor capture can't see formation edges, table drains or culverts that sit under verge vegetation. The design package inherits the blind spots.
Catching every variation between design and as-built across kilometres of corridor requires a level of coverage manual survey rarely provides — so claims, defects and disputes carry over into the maintenance period.
Drone LiDAR was made for linear infrastructure. A single flight captures the corridor with engineering-grade density end to end — formation, batters, drainage, vegetation, services and structures — geo-referenced to AHD/MGA control and packaged into chainage-based deliverables that drop directly into Civil 3D, 12d and Bentley workflows.
Every metre of the corridor is captured at hundreds of points per square metre. Cross-sections, contours and surfaces are derived deliverables, not the limit of the data.
Multi-return LiDAR sees ground beneath verge vegetation, drainage detail under trees and the actual edge of formation — not where the leaves stop.
Captures are flown from above the corridor in segregated airspace. The crew on the road is small and stays in a safe pull-off — no chainage-by-chainage exposure.
Linemarking, signs, guardrails, culvert headwalls, kerb-and-channel, drainage pits, lighting poles, vegetation — all extractable directly from the cloud and delivered as a GIS-ready inventory.
Same corridor, same control, year on year. Pavement deformation, rutting, drainage degradation and verge encroachment all drop out as period-on-period comparisons.
Outputs are referenced to your corridor chainage, project datum and design package. Every section and surface lines up where it should.
Full classified cloud — ground, pavement, structures, services, vegetation, vehicles — chunked by chainage segment for manageable file sizes.
Bare-earth surface across the full corridor strip, ready for design overlay, drainage modelling and surface comparison.
Cross sections at any chainage interval, with existing, design and difference — produced as a deliverable or on demand against an updated design.
Centreline long section with existing, design, super-elevation, sight-lines and grade — annotated against your chainage.
Linemarking, signs, guardrails, kerbs, pits and poles extracted from the cloud and delivered as a GIS-ready asset register.
Canopy clearance, encroachment, sight-line obstruction and drainage-blocking vegetation flagged from the same capture.
Confirm corridor extent, chainage origin, control strategy and asset extraction scope with the design or maintenance team.
Flight plan against terrain, structures and airspace constraints. CASA permits, ROL/REOC coordination, road authority notifications.
Linear flight along the corridor; full-strip capture in a single mobilisation. Trajectory, classification, QA pass against control checks.
Chainage-based deliverables packaged for Civil 3D, 12d or Bentley. Re-fly cycles scheduled for design iterations or maintenance.
From design surveys on new alignments to condition mapping of existing networks, tell us the corridor extent, chainage origin and deliverable package — we'll scope a capture window that fits your design or maintenance programme.