// Industries / Engineering
Drone LiDAR for Engineering Firms
Design-ready surfaces and point clouds that drop straight into CAD — captured this week, classified to your spec, delivered in your coordinate system.
- FAA-Certified Pilots
- Licensed Surveyor Partners
- Serving All 50 States
- 24-Hour Quote Turnaround
01// The Problem
Design Can't Start Until the Surface Shows Up
Every civil project has the same dead zone at the front: notice to proceed is signed, the design team is staffed, and everyone is waiting on existing conditions. If the topo takes six weeks, that's six weeks of schedule spent before the first alignment is drawn — and the pressure to "just start with the public DEM" produces exactly the redesign cycles it was supposed to avoid, when real terrain arrives at 30% and the grading doesn't work.
When data does arrive, it often arrives wrong: a point cloud too dense to open, in the wrong projection, with vegetation baked into the surface, delivered as a viewer-locked format your drafters can't touch. The firm ends up paying its own staff to rebuild a deliverable it already bought.
02// The Fix
Existing Conditions in Days, in Your Standards
We compress the existing-conditions phase to a flight and a processing cycle. A local, FAA-certified pilot captures the site — full parcels, corridors, or both — and our processing team returns data scoped to your CAD standards from day one. Where firms put us to work:
- Site development topo. Topographic mapping for grading, drainage, and utility design, with bare-earth surfaces that hold up under canopy where photogrammetry can't.
- Corridor and alignment work. Roadway, rail, and utility projects use our corridor mapping to capture long alignments for profile and cross-section generation.
- Verification and change detection. Re-flying a site answers "has anything changed since the survey?" before you stamp a design onto terrain that moved.
- Overflow capacity. When your usual data sources are backed up, we're a capture arm you can scale on demand — in all 50 states, including the out-of-market project you just won.
03// Deliverables
Built to Your CAD Standards, Not Ours
Our point cloud processing is scoped around what your drafters will actually load: ground-classified LAS/LAZ at a density your workstations handle, DEM GeoTIFFs for analysis, CAD contours at your interval, and SHP files for the GIS side of the house — all in your project's coordinate system and vertical datum. Deliveries are working files, never viewer-locked formats.
04// FAQ
Engineering Questions, Answered
Will the data build a clean surface in Civil 3D?
Yes — that is the acceptance test we process against. You receive ground-classified LAS/LAZ decimated to a workable density plus CAD contours at your specified interval, in your project coordinate system and datum (state plane, NAVD88, or as directed), so the surface builds without a cleanup phase.
Can we specify coordinate system, datum, and contour interval?
Always. Scope is defined around your CAD standards: projection, vertical datum, units, contour interval, and file structure. We ask these questions up front — before the flight — so the delivery drops into your project without rework.
What if the project needs a certified topographic survey?
Pro LiDAR provides capture, mapping, and processing; when a deliverable must carry a professional land surveyor's certification, our licensed surveyor partners provide it. Remote Optix Inc. and Pro LiDAR are not professional land surveyors and do not represent themselves as such.
Can you handle corridor projects like roads and utilities?
Yes. Long-linear alignments — roadway, pipeline, transmission — are flown as corridor projects priced per mile, delivering classified point clouds and surfaces along the full route for alignment design and profile generation.
05// Start a Project
Get a Quote for Your Project
Send the site boundary and your CAD standards — we'll quote within 24 hours.
- Direct line
- (877) 729-5311
- team@prolidar.com