A STUDY OF STANDARDS AND REGULATIONS FOR THE USE OF DRONES FOR BUILDING INSPECTIONS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

The advent of technology has led to a new paradigm shift in the building and infrastructure maintenance industry – the proliferating use of drones / unmanned aircrafts (“UA”). Traditional methods of inspection are often time-consuming, resource and manpower intensive and dangerous. Besides, not all areas of an infrastructure could be inspected adequately due to the inaccessibility to hard-to-reach areas (Tan & Yoong, 2018).

Drones present unprecedented flexibility, enabling movement anywhere in 3-dimensional (“3D”) space and requiring only an operator to operate it from the ground. Hence, it is a suitable tool to aid in building inspections. However, despite trends of building inspection using drones, there had been minimal regulations governing the process of conducting such inspections in Singapore.

Therefore, this dissertation sets out to study the regulations required for the use of drones for building inspection. First, the literature review would provide the current status of drone usage as well as its impacts and existing regulations. Interviews with the relevant stakeholders would then be conducted to provide a better insight into the current methods and problems on the usage of drones for building inspection. Concurrently, the drone guidelines used in the maritime industry would be evaluated and compared against that of the built industry and the interview results. Lastly, a set of subsidiary legislation would be proposed for the use of drones for building inspections.