Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Just got back from GeoWeek. I convinced my boss to go with me because he's the board sponsor of some of our tech initiatives, and I'm very glad I did. He got a lot of value out of some of the sessions on implementing and managing this stuff at scale, and I got to introduce him to some friends I've been working with for years. We had a few drunken nights with the guys at my friend's company that does mobile lidar as part of their service lines. He's gung-ho on mobile lidar now.
 
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Bandwagon

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Kolohe
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Getting better and better at the lidar collections now. Unlike photogrammetry, less overlap actually helps a lot with better classification (possibly just because it's a noisy sensor). The last 3 flights we've done have all be 90% done after the automatic classification, requiring very little cleanup. Still underwhelming on Low vegetation (<1ft tall grasses and shrubs), exceeding expectations on med-high veg and overall accuracy. Avg control + checkpoints values ending up in the ballpark of 0.04', RMSE <0.1' on everything except low, dense grass.

1679063524764.png


I'm really liking these Relative Elevation Models (REMs) in Global Mapper, too.

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Discovered an odd little depression in a topo yesterday, too. I flew the adjacent site in 2018 so I have old imagery that covers this area. it *looks* like they started scrubbing the parcel before it sold and someone buried a bunch of debris and garbage out here that's now settling. I could be completely wrong, but the geotech guys looked at it with me yesterday and they think it's suspicious enough that they're going to go do some more test pits.
CircleDTM.jpg
CircleOrtho.jpg



And while looking for a geomorphology tool to find closed depressions in a DTM in Whitebox Tools, I discovered they have tool called "TopoRender" that makes it easy to do the "shaded relief models" people have been doing in Blender for a year or two. I fucking hate blender, so was excited to see this. Only played with it for a few minutes, but looks promising enough that I'll find a use for it. Results are georeferenced, so I can actually use it for figures and stuff and overlap notes and symbology.

topoRender1.jpg


Nadir.jpg
 
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Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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Was on a call with a vendor today discussing some tower info and other project related tasks coming up. He was showing off some of the work they're doing with pix4d for tower mapping, was pretty awesome stuff. May make my life easier on the program management side having all this nice data going in to design and implementation phases.

Yellow showing the flight path of the drone surveying the tower. Attachments are all identified and named. Picture showing damage to a dish and shroud.
1679075442854.png



It can automatically identify some dishes and antennas. Can measure azimuth, plumb, etc...
1679075513196.png



Shots of the compound showing where we may install additional equipment or how we'd fit something in the fenced area.
1679075603975.png
 
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Bandwagon

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Kolohe
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Intrinsic said:
Was on a call with a vendor today discussing some tower info and other project related tasks coming up. He was showing off some of the work they're doing with pix4d for tower mapping, was pretty awesome stuff. May make my life easier on the program management side having all this nice data going in to design and implementation phases.

Yellow showing the flight path of the drone surveying the tower. Attachments are all identified and named. Picture showing damage to a dish and shroud.
View attachment 463979


It can automatically identify some dishes and antennas. Can measure azimuth, plumb, etc...
View attachment 463980


Shots of the compound showing where we may install additional equipment or how we'd fit something in the fenced area.
View attachment 463982
Click to expand...
Do you know what drone he was using?

See the little crosshair symbol in the top-right of the map in your last photo? Click on that and then click somewhere in the point cloud. It should show you the raw mapping photos used to generate that point. What's the file name on one of the photos?

Just curious what drone and software he used to fly that. The spiral flight pattern is really cool. I'm guessing he used ugCS or something....
 
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Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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I’ll double check with him tomorrow. These were just screen grabs he was showing over a WebEx so I could check the work since I’m consulting for the end client.
 
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Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Fucker said:
"Check arm locks"

How much did that lesson cost you? :oops:
Click to expand...
Nothing. I put that fucker on there on day 1 because I assumed that was the most likely fuckup anyone could make.

Asked my friend a month later what the most common cause of crashes is with the M300 and he said "People forgetting to lock the arms after unfolding them". So far so good.
 
Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Got a guy flying a site 300 miles away and watching in real time. Saw him come within 5ft of a tree, then pause, increase altitude, and then he sent me text message asking if it was ok to increase the altitude to 250ft because he's too
 

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Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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So I'm working on a vineyard layout survey right now, and I just met with the vineyard owner. I have a bunch of maps hanging up in my office and we nerded out for a bit about maps and cartography. I told him I'd love to start producing "pretty" vineyard maps from our survey data sometime in the future, and he got excited and gave me a kick in the ass to do it for some of his. Just so happens the graphic designer I work with all the time is in our office today, so we met with him and came up with some ideas for a proof of concept. Now I'm all excited because I've been wanting to do this forever. I showed him a bunch of the midjourney examples I made to come up with some ideas and he liked a bunch of them.
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Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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First job for a new client. Slope failure at a quarry. This is the first time I had an excuse to use the Livestream function and they loved it. We watched the pilot do mapping for about 30 minutes, then pulled him into the screenshare so we can talk to him and ask him to go look at a few specific areas while we were watching. Pretty cool.

1683741501643.png
 
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lurkingdirk

lurkingdirk

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Bandwagon said:
First job for a new client. Slope failure at a quarry. This is the first time I had an excuse to use the Livestream function and they loved it. We watched the pilot do mapping for about 30 minutes, then pulled him into the screenshare so we can talk to him and ask him to go look at a few specific areas while we were watching. Pretty cool.

View attachment 472976
Click to expand...

This is remarkable. What puts it over the edge for me is just how much you get done in a tiny amount of time. He only needed to map for 30 minutes before you guys went in for specifics? Outstanding.
 
Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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lurkingdirk said:
This is remarkable. What puts it over the edge for me is just how much you get done in a tiny amount of time. He only needed to map for 30 minutes before you guys went in for specifics? Outstanding.
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Yea it's quick. Took him about 2 hours to set survey targets, then 20 minutes for the lidar flight and 35 minutes for the photogrammetry flight. He's doing site photos and panoramas right now, then he'll get another shot on all the survey targets before leaving. I'll have all of the imagery, point clouds, 3d models and virtual tours online within 48 hours so the project team can look at it and start planning their own field work. In the mean time, we'll be working on the survey & DTM surface and will have them a survey CAD file within 2 weeks.

The geologist I'm doing this for used to work at the same company as me. He had us do it because he knows I typically give preliminary files within 48 hours and they're planning to mobilize on Monday to the site.

I've given a few presentations lately that essentially boil down to "Give the whole team access to the full UAS datasets, not just the prepared files...", and showing how I do all that. I've been asked to give the same presentation at 2 more conferences coming up, so this is going to be a perfect one to add in as an example.

The main thing I'm excited about though is the 3D model from DJI Terra. ArcPro .SLPK is one of the export options for these crazy 3D models, but I haven't worked with anyone yet that's actually capable of using them. This geologist is a heavy ArcPro user and plans to use it though, so it'll be the first time we incorporate those into a real project.
 
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lurkingdirk

lurkingdirk

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Bandwagon said:
Yea it's quick. Took him about 2 hours to set survey targets, then 20 minutes for the lidar flight and 35 minutes for the photogrammetry flight. He's doing site photos and panoramas right now, then he'll get another shot on all the survey targets before leaving. I'll have all of the imagery, point clouds, 3d models and virtual tours online within 48 hours so the project team can look at it and start planning their own field work. In the mean time, we'll be working on the survey & DTM surface and will have them a survey CAD file within 2 weeks.

The geologist I'm doing this for used to work at the same company as me. He had us do it because he knows I typically give preliminary files within 48 hours and they're planning to mobilize on Monday to the site.

I've given a few presentations lately that essentially boil down to "Give the whole team access to the full UAS datasets, not just the prepared files...", and showing how I do all that. I've been asked to give the same presentation at 2 more conferences coming up, so this is going to be a perfect one to add in as an example.

The main thing I'm excited about though is the 3D model from DJI Terra. ArcPro .SLPK is one of the export options for these crazy 3D models, but I haven't worked with anyone yet that's actually capable of using them. This geologist is a heavy ArcPro user and plans to use it though, so it'll be the first time we incorporate those into a real project.
Click to expand...

That's just amazing. Has to make your job so much easier to get data so quickly. Turnover has to have changed dramatically in the last decade.
 
lurkingdirk

lurkingdirk

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Bandwagon said:
Makes the other people's jobs easier a lot of the time. It's just a chance for me to show off. ;)
Click to expand...

See, I totally believe that. But you wouldn't be able to if you weren't proficient. Or at least adequately not stupid. I'd love to watch you work for a day. I think it would be incredibly enlightening for a person like me who knows nothing of this. Plus I'd get to look at your butt.
 
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Pasteton

Pasteton

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Gettin a little creepy in here. Need a midjourney image pls with these prompts - brokeback mountain, quarry background, drones flying overhead
 
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