Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Do you have any theories about why people only want to discuss this in pm?

heh i just didn't wanna be a pest here...

and DAMN much faster than i thought....nice, now to convince the Boss (Dad) to buy one for the "company" muhaha.

it would pay for itself in like 10 jobs that we would need it on....

oh i know it's not plug and play we'd have to learn the process etc, and refresh on "how to fly an RC" which is why i said ~10 jobs...

but if we can fly it and have the "field work" relatively quickly(arrive on site, fly site) finished - based on your comments on how long it took to fly said 13 acres, we could still charge the client our normal per day rate- and use how many days it would take NORMALLY to topo the site (1-4 days depending on the site size) yet spend only a few hrs on site for that job, and do other pending work that is our B&B job (boston water and sewer plans for remodels etc- we do anywhere from 2 to 8 a week- this week i think it is going to be 6 - i'll have completed 4 tomorrow for submission to the city on thursday) productivity goes up.....

The US Forest Service had a competition last year in conjunction with some timber companies for some kind of cheap aerial alternative to having a person on the ground doing cruising (walking the timber and doing samples, plots etc..to estimate the trees and their volume). I know one company spent a crapload trying to develop a system. It turned out to be a massive failure. Foresters have always used aerial photographs for estimating timber but it's not so accurate and the drone deal turned out to be even less. It also totally failed at the identify any unique problems with the stand section like timber beetles etc..which is a huge reason you have a tech on the ground. Maybe one day.

Bandwagon_sl said:

I proposed this to one other person from the forums as well, but I would do it for you also.

We're getting a little more serious about setting up some partnerships to be more like franchises. These guys aren't familiar with anything other than aerial photography.
I need a "test dummy" to see how well it would work with how I want to set it up.
If you want me to set something up like what we have, it would be roughly $1500-$2k. I'd charge $100 to set it all up....or I can give you a list and you can do it yourself.
If you wanted us to process the data, I'd charge the normal rates....but mainly I want to see how much of the "hard" stuff I can do remotely.
The plan is to send these guys ready to map packages, and then I remote in to the tablet and upload the premade survey

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This is a great idea. Handling the legalities of setup and updates would be good too. I'm pretty confident I could sell this to an architectural firm i used to work for easily and prob get a few jobs a month with little marketing

I understand. I would find a way to delegate, sell packages, training, and maintenance etc as soon as you get free time, the guy that makes millions off this won't still be the one doing the flying.

Bandwagon_sl said:

And that is a great example of people trying to use drones in situations that don't make sense. That doesn't even make sense on paper, I don't know how it got approved. What was the plan to penetrate the canopy....or did they just think that they had software that could count the tree tops?




Anyways, just installed the new mount for the RE3 (to account for the 10-12degree forward tilt during flight), and I put on the DLS. Everything except the camera itself is temporarily mounted. We're getting another solo with 5v2a wired in with a separate BEC from the battery, so we'll drop a lot of weight from that extra battery pack.

I'm hoping that the guy that made this mount for me wants to try tackling the GPS and DLS mount. The problem is that the DLS (which is the little red box on top) needs to be above everything else, and the solo doesn't have any good attachment points on top.

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Depending on what you are looking for you don't need to penetrate the canopy. A lot of places they use two shots from different angles similar to photogrammetry to get the height of the tree and such. But what they couldn't do was ID a pine beetle outbreak in the early stages. It was good for picking up an outbreak when it reached the point of no return from just simple brown needles on the tree. Early stage you look for small sections of sap coming off the tree which wouldn't work even if they could penetrate the canopy. It wasn't accurate enough when you are looking for the difference in .10" in diameter and such. Normally measured with a point sample technique using a prism.

The second biggest issue is known as topographic leveling. If you look at a stand of trees on the side of a small hill they will normally all have the same top height to some degree, not height above ground. So from a drone a stand all the trees looked the same height even tho they weren't because of terrain elevation differences.

I'm not sure. I took a photogrammetry class in school and we were provided photos. They seem to be of just about everywhere including stands on the national forest and of town. I dunno where they came from. They appeared to be flown in a strip and not very far apart from my untrained eye. I was thinking they ran in strips with overlap.

All we wound up doing was measuring total size of stands and then compared it to real world measurements and such. What would be fantastic but would take a lot of work, is a drone that could hover over a stand and drop a prism to 4.5' above ground and rotate around that prism with an electronic eye. That would be all you need to get a point sample which is very fast and very accurate and you can change the prism for how intense of a suvery you want.

An electronic eye to do this.

This tree is out and not counted. This is really open but imagine an area where it's much more dense. You rotate it around a point and count trees that are in. Do a little math to come up with basal area per acre. Each point can be done in seconds .



This tree is in and is counted. It's VERY accurate for total basal area of a stand which is what you need to plan thinnings and final harvest, much more than height of the tree.

I think it was more of a proof of concept with the US Forest Service and some timber companies. But using the prism stuff above it would only have to lower the actual prism and whatever eletronic eye it uses to "look" thru the prism down to 4.5'. The drone could have above the canopy. Prism weighs probably an ounce at most. It's a piece of glass an inch long by 1/2" or so.

Timber companies cruise their timber a lot less often. The US Forest Service tries to do 25% of their stuff every year with a real low intensity cruise for management purposes. I really don't see the need for them. Possibly private timber companies. There's a crapload of students at the college level who are willing to do it very cheap (I did it for $7/hour) and some even free to put on their resume.

boss is interested, but since i am the tech goto guy, it will be up to me to follow up etc on the drone thing- I think it'd be useful, our survey guy, not so much- but that will have to wait a few weeks - vacation tomorrow