Drone Technology in High-Rise Building Construction Monitoring: A Conceptual Review with Reference to Bangladesh's Real Estate Sector

Abstract

High-rise residential and mixed-use construction has become the dominant urban development typology in rapidly densifying South Asian cities, and Bangladesh is no exception, with land scarcity in Dhaka pushing developers toward taller, more complex structures on constrained footprints. Monitoring the progress, safety, and quality of such projects using conventional ground-based methods is increasingly difficult given vertical scale, multiple concurrent work fronts, and restricted site access. This paper presents a conceptual review of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) applications in high-rise construction monitoring, synthesising the academic and industry literature on photogrammetry, Building Information Modelling (BIM) integration, safety surveillance, and progress tracking. The review is anchored by an illustrative case drawn from an ongoing high-rise residential development in Dhaka, where periodic aerial documentation has been used informally to support progress communication. Drawing on this practitioner vantage point together with the literature, the paper proposes a conceptual framework for structured drone-integrated monitoring across the high-rise project lifecycle and discusses the regulatory, economic, and organizational barriers that condition adoption in the Bangladesh context. The paper concludes by identifying priority directions for empirical research, including quantification of accuracy and time savings under local site conditions.