How to Automate DroneDeploy

One flight replaces a week of walking the site

DroneDeploy is reality capture software. A drone flies a site on a plan it was given, the images come back, and within hours there is a current map of the place that everyone from the superintendent to the owner can argue from. DroneDeploy Aerial covers the flying and mapping, and DroneDeploy Ground covers the same job walked with a camera.

It is used on construction sites, in energy and mining, across farms, and on infrastructure that is too long or too awkward to inspect on foot. It is also the working tool of a whole category of small business: the drone services operator who flies other people's sites and sells the result.

For that operator the flight is the product, the client is a contractor or a grower or an insurer, and the deliverable is something a client looks at once and then makes decisions from for a month.

Every flight drags a file of dates behind it

Flying commercially is a licensed activity, and the licence is a stack of dates that expire independently of one another.

Each pilot holds a remote pilot certificate with recurrent training that comes due. Each aircraft has a registration on the FAA's DroneZone with a renewal on it. Airspace near a controlled field needs an authorisation, which for most flights comes through LAANC in an approved provider's app, and anything outside the standard rules needs a waiver that was applied for on the FAA's own site and carries an end date.

Then the client's requirements, which are separate paperwork entirely. A certificate of insurance naming them, a site induction, a safety plan, a document portal to upload it all into, and a badge that expires. None of that is flying, and all of it decides whether a crew that drove two hours is allowed onto the property.

DroneDeploy

Certificates checked while renewable Pilot certificates, recurrent training, aircraft registrations and open waivers read off the FAA account pages weekly, with anything close to expiry raised early.

Site access sorted the day before Each client's document portal checked for the insurance certificate, induction and safety plan they demand, so nobody is turned away at a gate.

Deliverables that get followed up Maps checked for whether the client actually opened them, and quotes with no reply listed by how long they have been silent.

DroneDeploy automates the flying and reads what came back

The genuinely solved part of this is everything between takeoff and the report.

Flights run autonomously from a plan, including corridor flight for linear assets like a roadway, a canal or a utility line, where terrain awareness adjusts altitude to hold a consistent ground sampling distance, and 2D orbit flight for a repeatable circle around a single asset. Progress AI reads installed work by location and trade without needing a schedule or a BIM model, and returns within about two hours of upload, from drone data, 360 walks or both. Safety AI and Earthworks AI work the same imagery for different questions. Dock automation and the robotics line let flights happen on a site with no pilot standing on it.

So the capture is handled, and so is the interpretation.

What is not handled is the hour before the flight and the week after it. The FAA's site does not talk to DroneDeploy. Neither does the client's document portal, the insurer, the accounting system, or the inbox where a quote has been sitting unanswered since Tuesday.

Tomorrow's flights get cleared before the van is loaded

Certificates, waivers, registrations and insurance all carry an expiry date, and each of those dates is printed on a page the operation can already sign into.

Every pilot's certificate, recurrent training date, aircraft registration and open waiver read off the FAA account pages weekly, with anything expiring inside ninety days raised while it can still be renewed quietly. Client portals checked for the documents each site demands before a crew arrives, so a lapsed insurance certificate is found the day before rather than at a gate.

The commercial side gets the same treatment. Quotes that went out and got no reply, listed by how long they have been silent. Contracts approaching renewal, with the recurring flight schedule they carry. Invoices past due, with the client and the job attached.

And the deliverable itself. A client portal checked to see whether anyone actually opened the map uploaded on Friday, because a survey nobody looked at is a phone call worth making before the invoice goes out.

Judgement stays with the operator. Whether to fly in that wind, whether to take a site on, whether to tell a client their inspection has slipped, and anything going to a client is drafted and read before it is sent.

A grounded aircraft is always a date somebody missed

None of those dates announce themselves. Somebody has to go and look, and the cost of looking late is a crew standing at a gate with an aircraft that cannot legally leave the ground.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in the way your operations staff are. It opens the FAA account pages, the client's document portal, the accounting system or the airspace provider, reads what is on the screen, and returns a list with the dates attached.

It runs on your schedule inside your own private environment, and a workflow can be locked to an explicit list of sites. You can watch a run and stop it at any point.

Each workflow below is built already, and names the sites it opens.