Full GIS services VS tools like DroneDeploy & Pix4D

[MikeDB]

Hi All,

This is my first post so please be 'gentle' with me lol. Ok, I’m looking for some help, from what I can see, with tools like Pix4D and DroneDeploy drone pilots can now deliver missions that require the following deliverables:

- 3D Point Clouds
- Digital surface & terrain modelling
- Orthomosaic
- volume calculations & thermography

What I'm interested in is, what types of jobs/opportunities are you walking away from because you don’t have the GIS (ESRI) tools, analytical and or data management skills? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Mike

 

[R Martin]

Hi All,

This is my first post so please be 'gentle' with me lol. Ok, I’m looking for some help, from what I can see, with tools like Pix4D and DroneDeploy drone pilots can now deliver missions that require the following deliverables:

- 3D Point Clouds
- Digital surface & terrain modelling
- Orthomosaic
- volume calculations & thermography

What I'm interested in is, what types of jobs/opportunities are you walking away from because you don’t have the tools, equipment or data management skills to deliver the required deliverables? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

Mike

You are looking at this backwards. A UAV and the peripheral software are nothing but tools. Granted, you need to know how to use them well, but they are just tools. Pix4D will spit out a DSM and DEM but it still requires editing before it is a product you can sell. The tool still requires you to have a working understanding of the job at hand in order to be of use. Taking thermal images and being a certified thermographer that is able to interpret the data you collected (and understanding how to collect that data properly) is two different ends of the candle.

So my question is what background do you bring to the table? Do you know how to create a DSM and DTM and clean it up where it is actually something that you can sell? Can you perform volumetric calculations or are you a certified thermographer that is able to interpret thermal imagery? If so, can you build a customer base that you can sell those services using the UAS and the peripheral software? It won't be easy and will take a lot of time and capital and a solid business plan to make it work.

The short answer is without the background, the learning curve is really steep in a competitive business where the wheat gets separated from the chaff really quick.

 

[R.Perry]

Welcome to the forum. I started doing mapping with Drone Deploy almost two years ago. At the time I knew nothing about 3D modeling, Surveying, and volume calculations. Fortunately I work for a company that was willing to train me. The sad part that I see, is with RTK accuracy it will eventually put some surveyors out of a job. As Martin said, the drone is only a tool, and tools are only as good as the person using them. What I'm hearing from my client is that drones will be employed on everyone of their job sites from now on and into the future.
I do weekly mapping of UC Merced construction site, they have got to the point where they say my mappings and panos save them countless hours each week just in inspections and monitoring construction progress much less the surveying aspect. The surveyors have told me the accuracy of the mapping is spot on, not up to RTK standards of 2cm or less horizontally and vertically, but about 5 to 8 cm. It's a new world out there, and technology is changing it everyday.

 

[clolsonus]

What I'm interested in is, what types of jobs/opportunities are you walking away from because you don’t have the GIS (ESRI) tools, analytical and or data management skills? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

I might be reading too much (or the wrong things) into your question, but I think it is an interesting starting point for a discussion.

Like you say, the existing software tools are really good at what they do, and there are a lot of people here that are really good at using them. Do potential use cases exist that go beyond what current software tools offer? Or are people interested in using some advanced analytical tools like arcgis offers?

Currently I'm involved in two projects where we are trying to explore machine learning to find specific types of plants in our imagery. This is something the ESRI tools might support (but we don't own them, and I don't know how good they would be at finding our particular plant at the resolutions we are going for.) I sat in on an arcgis webinar the other day and they had a really interesting example of using 'deep learning' to find all the burned out structures in a survey area -- fairly relevant considering all the forest fires out west these day (rake your leaves people!) These are they types of things humans can be pretty good at spotting, but as the jobs scale up in size, it would be really nice to have a computer doing all this dull work of scrolling through possibly 10's or 100's of thousands of images.

In our projects we've bumped into limits or issues with drone deploy and pix4d that have been stumbling blocks for us. As a result we've experimented with writing some of our own stitching/mapping tools from scratch (which I don't recommend other people try, unless you enjoy the same types of pain as I do.) All our work is released under an open-source (MIT) license in case anyone is interested and wants to experiment on their own data ...

I've just started experimenting with some simple machine learning techniques using python. I can't say I've managed any slam dunks yet (not sure I can even jump up and touch the rim.) It turns out that what I'm looking for is very subtlety different from it's surroundings in both texture space and color space. Machine learning can do some amazing things, but often not so good at subtle differences. Anyway, I'm trying to learn about machine learning, but apparently I still need to train my brain with a lot more information before I am able to do anything very useful with it.

If there was a place (or people here) that wanted to discuss machine learning and classification tools, I'd be up for it. As I think back, most of my aerial survey work has involved looking for things that are out of place (debris in the ocean, invasive plants, invasive insects ...) Off the shelf software and even really polished dji hardware has tended to almost, but not quite do what I need.

Curt.

 

[MikeDB]

You are looking at this backwards. A UAV and the peripheral software are nothing but tools. Granted, you need to know how to use them well, but they are just tools. Pix4D will spit out a DSM and DEM but it still requires editing before it is a product you can sell. The tool still requires you to have a working understanding of the job at hand in order to be of use. Taking thermal images and being a certified thermographer that is able to interpret the data you collected (and understanding how to collect that data properly) is two different ends of the candle.

So my question is what background do you bring to the table? Do you know how to create a DSM and DTM and clean it up where it is actually something that you can sell? Can you perform volumetric calculations or are you a certified thermographer that is able to interpret thermal imagery? If so, can you build a customer base that you can sell those services using the UAS and the peripheral software? It won't be easy and will take a lot of time and capital and a solid business plan to make it work.

The short answer is without the background, the learning curve is really steep in a competitive business where the wheat gets separated from the chaff really quick.

Thank you for your response Richard, we agree 100%. For context, I work for Coastal Resource Mapping who has been delivering highly reliable outsourced GIS services for over 20 years. CRM is a full-service shop where we use UAV’s to capture data and then leverage our GIS team's analytical and data management experience to support our strong base of re-occurring clients.

Our customer base includes major projects within all levels of local and federal government as well as international clients including projects with major oil and gas companies and utility companies operating globally. On a day to day basis, we’re the outsourced GIS department for a network of engineering firms and natural resource companies who we’ve been working with for over two decades. We consider ourselves experts in the ESRI environment and working with data management systems such as SQL Server and Oracle.

I asked the above question to see if there were real GIS data manipulation & management opportunities within the UAV/Drone space people were walking away from because they didn’t have access to a team of GIS professionals like we have staffed here in BC Canada. From our perspective, if there are opportunities people are passing that we can help deliver, we’re very eager to start having those discussions.

Mike

 

[R.Perry]

Thank you for your response Richard, we agree 100%. For context, I work for Coastal Resource Mapping who has been delivering highly reliable outsourced GIS services for over 20 years. CRM is a full-service shop where we use UAV’s to capture data and then leverage our GIS team's analytical and data management experience to support our strong base of re-occurring clients.

Our customer base includes major projects within all levels of local and federal government as well as international clients including projects with major oil and gas companies and utility companies operating globally. On a day to day basis, we’re the outsourced GIS department for a network of engineering firms and natural resource companies who we’ve been working with for over two decades. We consider ourselves experts in the ESRI environment and working with data management systems such as SQL Server and Oracle.

I asked the above question to see if there were real GIS data manipulation & management opportunities within the UAV/Drone space people were walking away from because they didn’t have access to a team of GIS professionals like we have staffed here in BC Canada. From our perspective, if there are opportunities people are passing that we can help deliver, we’re very eager to start having those discussions.

Mike

Hi Mike

Since your in BC that is where our corporate offices are. The company is Multivista, I'm contracted to their San Francisco office. I'm fortunate that the contractor I work for has his own GIS professionals and great engineering staff that have taken me under their wing.

The next 200 acre UC Merced site will break ground in 2025, I'm retiring in August of next year. The contractor I work under is Webcor and they have jobs going all over the country, the drone work for them was a test when the project started, with some major changes we were able to mold what we gave them into data they could use effectively. We are also doing work at UC Davis but I'm not involved in that.

 

[R Martin]

Thank you for your response Richard, we agree 100%. For context, I work for Coastal Resource Mapping who has been delivering highly reliable outsourced GIS services for over 20 years. CRM is a full-service shop where we use UAV’s to capture data and then leverage our GIS team's analytical and data management experience to support our strong base of re-occurring clients.

Our customer base includes major projects within all levels of local and federal government as well as international clients including projects with major oil and gas companies and utility companies operating globally. On a day to day basis, we’re the outsourced GIS department for a network of engineering firms and natural resource companies who we’ve been working with for over two decades. We consider ourselves experts in the ESRI environment and working with data management systems such as SQL Server and Oracle.

I asked the above question to see if there were real GIS data manipulation & management opportunities within the UAV/Drone space people were walking away from because they didn’t have access to a team of GIS professionals like we have staffed here in BC Canada. From our perspective, if there are opportunities people are passing that we can help deliver, we’re very eager to start having those discussions.

Mike

From that perspective, I would say there are a lot of pilots who could use your services. And civil engineers, and architects, and....

 

[Flippigan]

Welcome to the forum. I started doing mapping with Drone Deploy almost two years ago. At the time I knew nothing about 3D modeling, Surveying, and volume calculations. Fortunately I work for a company that was willing to train me. The sad part that I see, is with RTK accuracy it will eventually put some surveyors out of a job. As Martin said, the drone is only a tool, and tools are only as good as the person using them. What I'm hearing from my client is that drones will be employed on everyone of their job sites from now on and into the future.
I do weekly mapping of UC Merced construction site, they have got to the point where they say my mappings and panos save them countless hours each week just in inspections and monitoring construction progress much less the surveying aspect. The surveyors have told me the accuracy of the mapping is spot on, not up to RTK standards of 2cm or less horizontally and vertically, but about 5 to 8 cm. It's a new world out there, and technology is changing it everyday.

Hello, I am at the same point as you 2 years ago, I know almost nothing about 3D modeling, surveying, and volume calculations. But I can almost taste the large client base of foreman and engineers that I can get into contact with who could benefit from the time saving magic of UAV mapping. I’ve used drone deploy to create several maps in my spare time and played around with the orthomosiac, 3D map, point clouds and topographic files. However Im no closer to making a useable product than a monkey with a computer. my question for you is can you tell me what key terms I can research/where could I go to learn how to take all the files drone deploy is capable of creating and turn them into something usefull? P.S I map with an inspire 1 with X5, further down the road I’ll either invest in a Emlid Reach RS+ (for creating accurate Ground Control Points) as per Drone deploys recommendation, or just buy a phantom 4 RTK, either way I need further training into what to do with the files that DroneDeploy creates.
All the best,
-Finn J

 

[R.Perry]

Hello, I am at the same point as you 2 years ago, I know almost nothing about 3D modeling, surveying, and volume calculations. But I can almost taste the large client base of foreman and engineers that I can get into contact with who could benefit from the time saving magic of UAV mapping.
-Finn J

First let me ask, what is wrong with the maps you have already produced? Or should I ask, what exactly are you looking for?