Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Holy shit, this is the ugliest drone I've ever seen

DJI Inspire was pretty damn close to the right idea.
I really just want something like a Mavic 2 with a good mapping camera. Even smaller, if you can do so without reducing battery life, range or wind tolerance.

And I'm so disappointed in Skyward. As soon as they were acquired by Verizon, they became whores for Verizon 5g.

And yea....Parrot fucking sucks. The only feather they have in their cap is the eBee and even that is solely because they acquired Sensefly. I actually just read that Sensefly is being aquired by AgEagle. wtf.

Vepil said:

Bandwagon L Lenardo

Old Peachtree Rd | Rock Robotic Cloud

cloud.rockrobotic.com

click the 3D LiDAR button in the upper left side to get to the point cloud.

Here is a link to one of our smaller projects. Mapped this one in 14 hours office and 2.5 hours in the field. Not our best work but was under the gun to get this one out the door as it was a late addition request.

View attachment 392967

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That looks pretty damn clean. Did you classify it? I tried filtering to ground returns but I'm not sure if it's just not loading or if it's not classified.

edit: ahh, nevermind. I see it's not classified. That road surface looks really nice and clean though. Powerlines came through well, too.
What are you guys using to digitize/vectorize it?

And is there a way to filter by last return in that viewer?

My photogrammetrist/lidar tech friend loves topoDot too. I signed myself and all of our surveyors and drafters up for a live demo last year. I thought that it looked great....but I wanted to see the drafters using the point clouds from the SX10 in TBC a little more often before I bought us some seats of TopoDot. And that hasn't happened at all. Really drives me crazy that -everyone- here just totally overlooks point clouds or doesn't want to learn how to use them. No one wants to deal with them directly....either I digitize and give them line work or it doesn't get used at all. And this is across all of our offices in 2 states. They just hear "Point cloud" and think "Oh, that's Bandwagon's stuff" and that's the end of it. I told my supervisor last month that it's getting embarrassing how we're falling behind on stuff like this because there's only a few of us that have any interest at all in learning new stuff. I love this place, but I think all the time "Sure would be nice to work at a place where my coworkers can use 80%+ of the stuff I produce instead of 30% of it". At this point I just want us to aquire a small lidar/photogrammetry company.

Vepil said:

I hear ya, was very similar to my old place sounding.

This company I am at now is very cool. It is just me and the RLS running the show. He started working with laser scanners the year Cyra came out with the 2400 and has been doing scanning since so he has a huge background in this kind of work and loves it. I started out selling the Cyra 2500 back in the late 90's and I still love point clouds, scanning and lidar. This is my world and I now have all the tools and software to do it.

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You live in a red state? How's property prices there? Think I could get you on the phone with my wife for 15-45 minutes?

Vepil said:

Bandwagon L Lenardo

You guys have work coming from everywhere? We are so covered up we raised our prices 25-30% and it just keeps coming in.

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Yea, for about a year now. I'm getting bombarded with new hires and gis requests, and the second the weather got good again I got hit with 13 flight requests. We are insanely busy and it's impossible to find anyone, especially surveyors. And the survey manager finally set a date for his retirement, which is March 2023, so we're about to be fucked.

Vepil said:

We just purchased a second m300 with LiDAR. Have enough work right now to keep both going for the next 6 months with ease.

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We're doing our demo next week. I'm 98% on board, I just want to see it in action and the process of filtering to ground.

What kind of jobs are you doing with it?

Vepil said:

We are doing everything with it to be honest, ALTAs and topo surveys. On the ALTA title surveys we can fly it and do all the site improvements in the office much faster than the field. They do the property pins, fence lines and dip storm/sanitary. Just finished a 400 AC topo survey. I have a good friend that runs another survey department that only wants to do the boundary so he is feeding us all the topo's also.

What I have found that works best is on heavy foliage sites we will fly crosshatched pattern to maximize our chances for the laser to get to ground. Currently while leafs are off we only fly one direction and its plenty. We don't use any of the LiDAR companies cloud based processing we bought the license to process it ourselves and do the mapping through TopoDot. Works really good so far and you can classify the cloud in it and turn off everything but ground and low veg do the mapping makes it much faster.

What brand are you guys demo'ing?

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Same one as you I think. It's the DJI ~$40k one. M300 w/ P1/L1
I really, really want to get some of our draftsmen using topodot. Such a cockblock not having anyone that can deal with point clouds.

I've been a little impressed with the P4Pro RTK. Camera is just as shitty as the other V2s and the model I got doesn't support DJI Pilot or DD, but it's looking like an improvement in every step of the workflow. When I first process, I just mark 3x targets in 3x images each so I'm in the general ballpark when I go to mark the rest of the targets. Normally, I'll see vertical 0.2' to 2ft during this step. After reoptimizing, they're always <0.06'. Checkpoints usually 0.08' - 0.3'. With the RTK model and using the settings for precise geolocation, targets in the quality report are a little bit worse, around 0.08', but checkpoints are much better and <0.1'. That was the manual qa/qc on my last flight and I realized when I got back that it was in AFC the entire time.

What do you use to classify & filter to ground? The DJI software?