Bandwagon
Kolohe
- 24,323
- 65,451
Most of our UAS mapping is done side by side with traditional survey. At least for all of our Surv/Eng projects (Natural Resources doesn't need survey on their flights).
Collecting imagery and/or lidar isn't really the problem, It's how to use it afterwards. Everyone can trace an ortho for 2d linework. Pulling out 3d linework is a lot tougher and, at this point, pretty much has to go through me because I can't get anyone else to dedicate enough brain power to learning how to use point clouds themselves. If we could get 2 or 3 drafters really up to speed on digitizing 3d point clouds, we'd be using them a lot more often (from the drone, but especially from the Trimble SX10).
As far as GIS goes, I think that we're pulling ahead of a lot of survey and/or engineering-only firms that are about our size or smaller. But we also have geotech, environmental engineering, natural resources, etc and I think it's inexcusable that these guys weren't already balls-deep into GIS before I started. There are so many calls I get now that are absolute bottom of the barrel/simple GIS requests that save project managers a huge amount of time on their budgets compared to how they were planning on doing it (and always have). This is stuff that I've been telling them about for at least 3 years, but they're just now seeing other PMs use it and call me to ask if I can help. It literally takes me about 3 hours to teach one of their staff how to do and often ends up saving somewhere in the ballpark of 4-16 hours per project. I have to keep myself from yelling "HOW FUCKING LONG HAVE I BEEN TELLING YOU...." every time I hear something like "Oh this is cool....".
So that's just the basic stuff, but the cell/tablet apps are really catching on and I'm trying to get a few more people to volunteer to learn that process. I think it takes someone that is actually interested in learning this and the efficiency gains it brings to the table, though. You're not going to have any luck tasking someone with this and expecting them to be useful if they don't find it personally interested. This is what the XLS forms look like to build a form for the mobile app
And the automation scenario to add it to the geodatabase, generate a report, and *finally* export a KMZ file with locations, as well as make all of the photos available for download.
This stuff is boon to field work on multiple levels and takes more work to maintain. I'm a little nervous about getting too many people using it before we have a real GIS-P with enterprise experience hired and running the show.
Plenty of other stuff like site suitability analysis and traffic hazard studies that really make sense to do in GIS over CAD. There's just really no excuse for not having a robust GIS group already up and running considering all of the different markets and services we serve. If it was only a survey shop? Sure.....GIS isn't quite as useful.
Collecting imagery and/or lidar isn't really the problem, It's how to use it afterwards. Everyone can trace an ortho for 2d linework. Pulling out 3d linework is a lot tougher and, at this point, pretty much has to go through me because I can't get anyone else to dedicate enough brain power to learning how to use point clouds themselves. If we could get 2 or 3 drafters really up to speed on digitizing 3d point clouds, we'd be using them a lot more often (from the drone, but especially from the Trimble SX10).
As far as GIS goes, I think that we're pulling ahead of a lot of survey and/or engineering-only firms that are about our size or smaller. But we also have geotech, environmental engineering, natural resources, etc and I think it's inexcusable that these guys weren't already balls-deep into GIS before I started. There are so many calls I get now that are absolute bottom of the barrel/simple GIS requests that save project managers a huge amount of time on their budgets compared to how they were planning on doing it (and always have). This is stuff that I've been telling them about for at least 3 years, but they're just now seeing other PMs use it and call me to ask if I can help. It literally takes me about 3 hours to teach one of their staff how to do and often ends up saving somewhere in the ballpark of 4-16 hours per project. I have to keep myself from yelling "HOW FUCKING LONG HAVE I BEEN TELLING YOU...." every time I hear something like "Oh this is cool....".
So that's just the basic stuff, but the cell/tablet apps are really catching on and I'm trying to get a few more people to volunteer to learn that process. I think it takes someone that is actually interested in learning this and the efficiency gains it brings to the table, though. You're not going to have any luck tasking someone with this and expecting them to be useful if they don't find it personally interested. This is what the XLS forms look like to build a form for the mobile app
And the automation scenario to add it to the geodatabase, generate a report, and *finally* export a KMZ file with locations, as well as make all of the photos available for download.
This stuff is boon to field work on multiple levels and takes more work to maintain. I'm a little nervous about getting too many people using it before we have a real GIS-P with enterprise experience hired and running the show.
Plenty of other stuff like site suitability analysis and traffic hazard studies that really make sense to do in GIS over CAD. There's just really no excuse for not having a robust GIS group already up and running considering all of the different markets and services we serve. If it was only a survey shop? Sure.....GIS isn't quite as useful.
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