American made drones?

I don't have any personal experience, but I have looked around a bit.  The pickings are slim for survey-grade drones and the price will be quite higher.

We've got probably 20 DJI's of different varieties in our fleet.  We've looked into some American made drones and just haven't found anything suitable to replace them with.  So we will carry on until we can't for now.

I live near (and work on) a military base.  If you want to be sure that your drone will be 100% cleared to fly, choose on from this site.
https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list
It won't be cheap.  But I must say that I've used both imagery and LiDAR collected from the Wingtra platform and it was very reliable.

I'm currently looking heavly into the SkyScout drone with the Sony ILX-LR1 61mp Camera and a Respi Lite M2X Lidar from WISPR Systems.

Just had it Demo'd today. They are NDAA certified. Soon to be Blue List as well. 

It defintily is rougher around the edges than a DJI, but I was impressed. It is more expensive than than M300/350, you will be looking at around $75K for the Drone and sensors while a DJI M300/350 was about $38K. I do know that last month you couldn't even get a DJI because all the shipments were being held at customs.

@pschaeffer Interesting. Thanks for the tip. The agency I work for set aside barely enough to cover a DJI Mavic 3E, and like you said, customs is holding everything under the pretext of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, even though DJI is in Guangdong, completely different part of the country. I've looked at the Freefly Astro and WISPR Skyscout, but the price difference in the quotes means if the mucky-mucks want to go that route, they are going to have to budget substantially more coinage. Fortunately I have a Phantom 4 RTK I inherited and was able to get the firmware updated and with my new Part 107 in hand, looking forward to taking it out and flying my first mapping mission with it. I got so jazzed about the whole thing I purchase a DJI Mini to play with. Hoping to make some slick skiing videos with it using the tracking mode soon.

Posted by: @williwaw

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he pretext of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, even though DJI is in Guangdong, completely different part of the country.

Everything in China is CCP controlled. Just say no.

@norman-oklahoma What about your cell phone? I don't see anybody chucking those.

@williwaw Samsung is Korea I think so it's all good. 😏

@bstrand To be fair they should ban iPhones since they're also made in China. Samsung is a Korean company but manufactures in Vietnam and India. They left China in 2019 because of rising labor costs. (Google AI). 

Know what's funny? Federal employees are usually issued iPhones. 

Posted by: @williwaw

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What about your cell phone? I don't see anybody chucking those.

The point is that slave labor in China is not a pretext. 

@norman-oklahoma I'm confused. A pretext for what exactly. There's no evidence DJI uses slave labor. Does the Chinese government? Yes. Does the Chinese government have a hand in every Chinese company, directly or in indirectly, yes. Then ban everything made in China. This selective when it's politically expedient, is total bs.

@williwaw 

I'm OK with banning everything made in China.  

The CCP controls everything in China. So if one thing is tainted, it is all tainted.  I'm not criticizing you for buying a DJI drone. I own one, too.  I am being a little critical of you for passing off an effort by the government to enforce a federal law intended to protect the civil rights of others as a "pretext" for slowing up your delivery.   

@norman-oklahoma You know what's a bit ironic? It's a government agency unwilling to pony up enough for a US made drone that has me in this spot, and moreover if I was federal, I'd probably be unemployed.

@pschaeffer I an putting serious thought to build a somewhat large DIY Hexacopter(I do not want to send a heavier weight into the sky without backup).

How much does a drone need to do, but to follow a pre-determined pattern and take great pictures ... PixHawk is not costly, and neither are RTK bases(or in Ohio, free VRS).

The major issues, for me, are Air Time and a gimbal that can carry a really good camera

@retired69 I don't know enough to attempt to build my own drone for my company. We were looking at the Wispr drone as I had mentioned earlier, but we also just got to demo the Freefly Astro Max. After seeing that drone in person we are going to go with that with the same payloads.  The main selling point for is with the Astro is the Pilot Pro Controller. It is their own Controller designed for Astro, and not the problematic Herelink controllers.

Our local survey dealer is about to sign the paperwork to become a dealer for Freefly drones. So as soon as they do we will be ordering one with the Sony LR1 and the Respi M2X.

The current drone situation is tumultuous to say the least. Please do not take my following statements to be political or ethical judgements, just covering some information. 

American made drones:
Unfortunately, american made drones, as a packaged survey solution are simply falling massively behind DJI. Individual parts can be better (IMU's particularly), but putting a polished product ready to go fly is simply not the strong suit of available US options. I believe (without researching), that this is likely to most US drones are an amalgamation of available off the shelf parts, and not a dedicated ground up development. 

Additionally, (and unfortunately) what has been observed is that most big US drone manufactureers, once they have a product good enough for surveyors, it is generally good enough for US military purposes. Without the chinese ability to rapidly scale up production, these US firms then sell exclusively to the government, simply because they can pay more. 

Surveyor specific drones
The principal problem with survey grade drones is that we are generally a somewhat small market, and have little interest in nerding out on drones. Is there ability to build a superior product yourself? Absolutely! Assembling the parts and building an airframe isn't that tough, smart children are doing it these days. The problem is getting all the components communicating and timing with each other. The IMU, GPS, Camera and Lidar all need to be exact in their coordination, or your data simply isn't survey grade. Getting a drone to fly is easy, collecting georeferenced images from a IMU controlled Gimble is incredibly difficult. Getting an experimental airframe registered to fly under your FAA licence might be problematic. 

Most surveyors just care about the resultant data, and don't want to waste all their hours learning about drones. 

Future of drones
DJI is allready working around any potential ban, working on licencing their products to Malaysian and South American companies. If there is an outright ban on DJI, to the point where their market share is impacted, you will be able to get the exact same thing from these "Non-Chinese" providers. Again, survey drones are a small segment of the market, so there may be a delay before we can get our stuff..... but the high selling items should happen rather quickly. 

We are constantly seeing the acceleration of technology. The Phantom 4 was cutting edge for a decade. Our Matrice 300 is almost outdated at 4 years old. 

Current options - solutions - workarounds
Any federal funding CANNOT be used for flying a chinese drone. Different states have different rules, you may want to check current state laws, as well as contract documents on any project you are working or bidding on. Generally, most federal agencies are exempt from the laws, and it primarily impacts contractors doing work on federally funded projects. 

In my case, I am employed by local government. We have a few DJI Drones. We can fly the drones and collect the data, but cannot bill the work against the federal contract. In short, the local taxpayers cover those hours of flying time. Laying out aerial targets, processing the data, and driving to and from the site is all billable. Still substantial cost savings of a 4-5 hour flight vs a few weeks of traditional topo work

If you are in the private sector, I am not sure how this could be done and meet prevailing wage requirements..... unless the company owner was the pilot.

@summerprophet Interesting read. I'm in the same boat working for local government, which has it's pros and cons. They simply will not budget enough for any US made mapping drone and I was lucky enough to acquire a new DJI Matrice 4E last spring. The biggest problem I have is that I'm one person limited to working no more than 40 hours and I have several subdivisions in the works along with numerous design surveys, staking jobs, ect., all without any support staff, drafters, field crew, anybody really, there's just a real cap on what I can get done. I did get a chance to fly a mission a few weeks back on area that I did topo on and so I'm hoping to get some time over the winter to work on the post processing and filtering the point cloud to come up with a surface that I can compare with my GNSS topo'd surface. Again, I'm limited to using ESRI products so Site Scan is the only tool available to me and then plan on dusting off [REDACTED] to get the point cloud filtered so I can hopefully generate a surface. 

The crux of what I've learned about the American made drone systems comes down to very different business models in the US over DJI's. American drone makers focus on specialized areas like Search and Rescue, film making, markets where they can charge top dollar and profit selling fewer units, whereas the DJI model is more focused on the broader consumer market of scale across the world market. At this point if I manage to destroy the Matrice 4E I was lucky enough to find, getting it replaced will be a real stretch. 

Local government. Champagne tastes, (cheap) beer budget.

Me. Cheap beer beats no beer. 

Whats the latest on all of this with American made drones and sensors. I need a LIDAR and photogrammetry capable unit. Is DJI still the go to or have some of the American made Blue list models caught up so that we can get something for surveying now.

The main selling point for is with the Astro is the Pilot Pro Controller.