Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Vepil said:

When is your lidar unit coming in?

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Not sure yet. We should be scheduling the delivery and training any day now. All of those guys have been at AUVSI then catching up on out of town work

When I got rolling with my company, there's a remote sensing scientist that kind of took me under his wing and taught me a lot (and gave me a shit ton of $$ in free cameras). A few years later, I met a photogrammetrist/lidar tech that did the same thing. Both of them are buddies of mine now. I'm pretty sure I just got the remote sensing scientist a job offer from the other guy, too. He's flying out to meet him next month to talk about a gig. I'm legit excited to have both of those guys working together. Very smart fellas.

Also, the remote sensing guy helped me get Rayshader working today. This is just my first attempt, but I'm happy. This shit is an absolute nightmare to do in Blender.

Using these bad boys on proposals now.

Not sure I like the Vicinity Map, but this is actually a really good one to use it on (road and stormwater improvements)

We're getting our L1 on Tuesday. Already got it booked out for 6 jobs too. My friend coming out to do the training called me just to tell me the rock robotic dropped in price a lot.

Competing with DJI is definitely a race to the bottom, but a lot of these companies need to recognize that none of us are looking for the absolute top of the line system. We need something that can do the job, is easy to use and then the lowest price possible. Everyone that was scoffing at the L1 a year ago is dropping their prices to match now.

This is exactly why I didn't buy a VUX a few years ago. Even if I didn't pick up a DJI sensor, they reliably force the market to drop prices.

Hey Vepil , you're using TBC to work with the LAS files, right? I don't remember what you said

Also - supposedly the Mavic 3 with have a mechanical ahitter camera, thermal and RTK.

M30 is supposed to have some cool tool for taking a series of photos of an object, like a tower, then put them in individual folders and generate an HTML file for easy viewing. Very inspection-focused.

Vepil said:

Yeah the M30 is very police/fire focused in the demo I saw. Not very survey or engineering friendly except maybe for inspections but then seems overkill.

For TBC I used it a few times for smaller jobs since it sucks handling the point clouds we generate. I did do some classifications with it and thought TBC handled it really well.

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You do any modeling of structures or bridges?

I'm just going to hire 2x people to work with me full time. I'm tired of trying to borrow survey and engineering drafters and get them proficient, which never happens. Going to keep the arrangement of the current UAS program for everything +survey 2D, then have a small dedicated team for lidar and full blown 3D drafting.

I'm about to buy Microstation and topodot just because its so standard for DOT projects, but I have trouble believing that's still the best thing out there. Its so dated.

Alright alright alright, I'll get the damn thing. I didn't see anything for drawing structures that I was excited about during the demo though.

L1 - Failed to get to ground in ~2ft tall wheat. Not surprising. Nailed it in most of the other areas on the site we used for training. There was an area with dense canopy that it only got a few ground hits on....but it's very similar to the site where we go the demo a few months ago, which was fantastic. I'll just have to start paying attention to leaf-on/leaf-of for this stuff. The flight was also nearly max altitude and we were trying to give everyone time on the sticks, so maybe it'll be improved a little bit when I start fiddling with the flight settings.

P1 - Fucking awesome. Love the camera.

"Smart oblique" capture is awesome. 3D Model still looks like hot garbage in Pix4d. Looks pretty good in Metashape.....but it's fantastic in DJI Terra.


The spot between the rail cars and the elevator is where I expected a bunch of garbage and spiderwebbing in the mesh.....


It's definitely worse than the rest of the model.....but it still picked up a f'ing rat trap underneath the platform....


We used this site as a test because it's remote and has a lot of shit on the roof that's about the toughest thing to get to work with photogrammetry -> 3d Mesh. It did a pretty damn good job though.





Here's a quick flight we did over powerlines and railroad tracks, just playing around with the corridor flight planning options.

btw, this is the same spot I flew in 2016 and posted here, when I was trying to figure out the best way to fly/acquire images for a 3D model.

Tmac said:

Holy cow.

Lidar working well for forest inventory yet?

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Haven't tried that one yet. We have a dataset with a geoslam we rented, haven't tried processing anything from it yet. The guy that rented it went bonkers for about a week, so I think we have 16 or 18 datasets.