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Multirotor drones are considered a new and innovative technology. Therefore, many fields are showing increasing interest in utilizing multirotor drones, such as mapping in mining and surveillance in transportation. The construction industry has been a slow adopter of novel technologies. However, multirotor drones have potential to facilitate construction in many aspects. There is, therefore, a need to extensively research their applications and analyze their roles in construction engineering and management. This paper aims to comprehensively investigate the current applications of multirotor drones, analyze their benefits and explore their potential in the future of the construction industry. Several main aspects are reviewed and discussed, namely land surveying, logistics, on-site construction, maintenance and demolition. The results reveal that the main contributions are work safety, cost-effectiveness and carbon emission reduction, while there are possible adverse impacts on the basis of current limitations of multirotor drones. However, it can be predicted that the usefulness of drones will continue to increase in the future of the construction industry. Thus, this study will benefit construction managers in raising awareness of the use of these emerging technologies and researchers in further exploring applications of multirotor drones in construction projects.
Li et al. (Mon,) studied this question.