Cut and fill without a surveyor on site

Weekly earthworks progress is a drone flight and a design surface. What that gets you, and where it stops being good enough.

On most earthworks jobs the question is the same every week: how much has moved, and are we on programme. Traditionally that is a surveyor walking the site with a rover for a day. A drone answers it in a morning — with real caveats worth knowing before you promise anything.

What you actually need

The design surface is the part people forget. Without it you have a beautiful terrain model and no way to say whether it is right.

What it gets you

Cut and fill against design, per area, week over week. Because it is a full surface rather than sampled points, you see WHERE the variance is, not just the total — which is usually the more useful half. A rover gives you a hundred points; a flight gives you the whole surface.

Where it stops

A drone does not replace your surveyor. It changes what you need them for, which is usually the higher-value half of their work.

The weekly rhythm that works

Fly the same lawnmower pattern at the same height on the same day each week. Upload with the same control file. Compare against design and against last week. The consistency is what makes the trend meaningful — most of the noise people blame on accuracy is actually inconsistent capture.

The honest accuracy answer

With ground control and reasonable overlap, earthworks volumes from photogrammetry are well inside what progress reporting needs. Without ground control your model floats by metres against Earth, which is fine for a single week's shape and useless for comparing weeks.

DroneGrid takes your ground control file and ties the model to it, states relative and absolute accuracy separately because they are different numbers, and refuses to produce a comparison when two flights cannot be co-registered. Unlimited flights on every paid plan, because weekly is the whole point.