Hey sorry this thread has taken me so long to get back to...I'll try to give you as much info as possible. The landfills that I have been involved in monitoring perform their inspections either once a year, or quarterly depending on the type. Full disclosure I am a land surveyor and have been involved with monitoring landfills long before I was a certified remote pilot so most of my work with them has been outside the UAS world. Which makes it hars to give you any help in ths pricing department, however mapping about 50 acres for full 3d surface generation and volume calculations if done conventionally with a survey crew and a manned flight(which is how they've always done it) runs them between 10-15k depending on the type of monitoring they are doing. A single manned flight starts at around 5k in my area so coming in around 2500 and up isn't outlandish if you can generate results that rival conventional methods. Which I may add is harder than just doing a single grid flight with a few GCPs.
For GCP placement...I use a topcon GR3 RTK system for placing GCPs since I am a surveyor and already own the equipment. There are some modestly priced options out there loje the emlid reach systems that I have heard produce great results, as well as the propeller aeropoints which are stand alone targets with gps receivers built in so all you do is push a button to turn them on and let them stay on the same place for 90 minutes and process the point locations later. As for the locations that they should be placed...this changes at every location depending on the topography, you should have a good grid of GCPs and then additional GCPs at edges of steep inclines or atvthe bottom of pits as well as try to have GCPs at your highest and lowest points of the project. At minimum for a 50 acres site I would set about 15-20 GCPs so I have at least 10 to use for control and at least 5 for verification.
Topographers are the most likely to benefit from drones. One week's work taking points can be done in one hour. Of course, GPC's have to be taken.
Yesterday I was watching a video of how the Aeropoints work and I was disappointed that it took them up to 2 hours to calculate their coordinates accurately. Many jobs are relatively small spaces, 2 to 5 hectares and the flight is done in a matter of minutes. Having to wait two hours, I don't know, it doesn't catch my eye. The price doesn't call me either, $6000 for 10 Aeropoints and if you buy 20 it's $10,000. I see them expensive.
On the other hand, the use of RTK or PPK systems in drones is a better solution. Emlid and Drotek offer relatively inexpensive RTK L1 solutions that give you instant information with 2 to 3cm accuracy and we're talking about $1,000.
If you are thinking of taking the DJI M210 RTK, you should take a good look at it. It should not be a real RTK system and should not have the same accuracy. That's at least I've read over it.
We have different solutions at our disposal, it's a matter of studying them all well
