Aerial / Drone Mapping Solutions

Drone mapping, or drone land surveying, refers to the use of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) equipped with a downward facing camera to capture aerial imagery. Photogrammetry software then turns these images into maps, orthomosaics, 3D models, contour lines, point clouds and other virtual representations of the physical world. Drones have become excellent at providing fast, easily repeatable and cost-effective survey maps and insightful data across a variety of industries.

Drone mapping provides an up-to-date and accurate map or 3D model of an area, with complete measurements such as distances and volumes. This enhances decision-making in a number of industries. Also, as drones can fly lower, they can provide maps with higher resolution, lower GSD and better accuracy than manned aircraft or satellites. They are also capable of collecting hundreds or thousands of data points in less time than an operator could do with a terrestrial surveying instrument.

1. Check before you leave the office
Check the local regulations and make sure that you are allowed to fly your drone at the planned location. Also, make sure that the weather is suitable, meaning no rain, fog, snowfall or strong winds. Check that the battery of your drone and connected devices such as tablets are fully charged and that the memory card of your drone camera has sufficient empty space to capture the entire project.
2. Plan your flight
You can create the survey flight plan with the drone flight planning app on the tablet. For this, just tap and drag the points around the area you want to survey, or import a KML file. Make sure you account for tall objects within the flight plan, as well as altitude differences. If needed, you can adjust flight settings such as altitude, ground sampling distance (GSD), flight direction and images overlap.
3. Set up your flight in the field
During this step, you basically unpack and assemble the drone and make sure that it is ready to take-off in safe conditions. Following the interactive check-list, you will one-by-one check every parameter, like the calibration of the airspeed sensor and making sure the camera lid is removed.
4. Fly and collect images
After pushing the take-off button, the drone autonomously takes off, captures images and lands back where it started. In this step, the operator essentially makes sure that nobody approaches the drone during take-off or landing and that the weather conditions stay optimal for the survey mission.
5. Geotag your images
After one or several flights, import the images into WingtraHub software to geotag them s. Geo-tagging assigns geographical position (X, Y, Z) information to the images either in a separate CSV file or in the images’ meta-data.

The performance and type of drone, the quality of its components, the camera resolution, the height at which the drone flies, the vegetation, and the method and technology used to geolocate the aerial images can heavily influence the accuracy of drone survey mapping. At this point, it is possible to reach an absolute accuracy down to 1 cm (0.4 in) and 0.7 cm/px (0.3 in/px) GSD under optimal conditions with a high-end surveying drones.