American Surveyor arrived today. See page 25. Now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout. A fully sorted drone with gps lidar scanning tech.
Easy squeezy for a tinkering surveyor worth much to just do this with plain R/C flyers with wifi links for gps and digicam. Take a nice "pitcher" still frame of a golf club from as high as you can. Sell them a 6'x8' image for the 19th hole.
Add lidar. Rectify the image with more independant flights to build up some redundancy as stats suggest.
Anotate, symbols and legend. SprinklerHead=SH et al.
While golfing, set bag with gps down on SH, take your shot, record "waypoint" and anotate. Perfect planning map for the course, the greenskeeper, and the club members.
Some courses have gps for bags and carts. They can use the clients as field crews to log all positions traveled. Over time, those logs will build to a nice model. The golfers pay you to do the work for you.
Think I will stop by the local R/C shop to do a DIY drone budget study. It is just trickle down technology from the military development. They gave us gps, now they give us drones.
The R/C hobby is massive already. Just mount the camera and sensors and log the flights with wifi. If they can make a gps collar to fit a lizard, it will fit a medium big helecopter.
While you're at it can you check the price to do a boat? Something less than $20K? There are some cool packages but awfully pricy for small inshore hydro jobs.
Yup, here it is on point. Put this trick kit in your surveyor's bag.
http://www.draganfly.com/uav-helicopter/draganflyer-x8/applications/
Scroll down the page to find:
Real Estate Applications
Golf Course Promotion
Frank Willis has been doing that for some time ...
His demo flights are quite impressive. Frank's doing actual work for pay with his R/C units.
I just read an article that says it illegal to use drones for business purposes in the USA (hobby use is OK), it violates FAA regulations ... but they are considering changing that law.
I saw that setup at the ACSM Convention last summer. Talk about a cool setup.
Was telling Joe Paiva that they would sell those things like crazy. He said there was one small problem for United States users. At that time (last summer) we were not allowed to fly them in US airspace.
All that changed in the past few weeks.
These things are very cool. Gatewing**.
Larry P
**I am in no way connected to the company or the product. I have known Joe Paiva for several years and have tremendous respect for him. If Gatewing wished to make me an offer to get involved with the company I would certainly listen. 🙂
> I just read an article that says it illegal to use drones for business purposes in the USA (hobby use is OK), it violates FAA regulations ... but they are considering changing that law.
My understanding was in the past couple of weeks they came out with new rules allowing these. How old was the article you read?
Larry P
aww, i saw a great drone last year, only 60-70k and it had NO landing gear
it came with a spare fuselage which was only 3-4k to replace...
Yeah, it was probably a month ago that I was reading this. It did say in the article that changes to the FAA rules were being considered.
Unless they've done some serious magic to the drone, then you can't use lidar.
It's a UAV with a handheld quality gps on top and a ricoh digicam underneath.
Very cool, but here we need CASA certification, can't be used over populated areas, and has lots of other restrictions.