ABSTRACT
The increasing digitisation of the city and in urban planning means that drone capability and future directions are especially relevant in the dual role that UAS play in the sensor/mapping of city space, but also as a monitoring tool through emergent drone AI applied to urban design. Drones are a unique mobile machine. Within these roles, there are scales of operation and application. Drone studies may revolve around street-level urbanism, or large-scale construction sites, or as part of a MaaS, drone logistics network, as part of a city UTM. Situated as an evolution of smart cities, digital twins are real simulations of a physical asset (Grieves, 2001). While there is policy ambition in many countries towards city digital twins, digital cities predominately in fact in their current form result from the fusion of GIS and BIM data at building to regional scale. The current iteration and GIS/BIM fusion has many benefits and is an important step towards the creation of a digital replica but that stage has not been reached if it is possible at all (de Laat and van Berlo, 2011). Here, the use of drones as mapping tools links to the challenges in creating large information systems of cities and the challenges of analysis and responsiveness of drones to the city morphology. Drones are a unique medium in CIMs in their ability as responsive agents of architecture, through reconfigurable canopies (Aflalo et al., 2019), personal safety lights, and drone seeding systems for habitat management and reforestation amongst many other roles, key apparatus in the CIM ecosystem.
