Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vagas

Did anyone else go? I was there and learned a ton of info. Here are three big things I took from the conference...

1) This is still a new industry lots of people still feeling it out and figuring out the market.

2) This is going to be HUGE...massive changes to the way things can be done. We are already seeing survey grade accuracy when done correct and we are still in the infancy of this technology. Surveyors had better not miss this boat like many did with GIS.

3) Which leads to this exchange that happened during one of the presentations. I'm going to paraphrase here. A presenter was talking about topographic mapping of mines, etc. and someone in the crowd asked "a lot of what you are showing is covered under the Licensure either by Engineers or Surveyors in almost all states, how are you dealing with that". The response was very clear..."we don't care". He went on to say (again paraphrasing)..."This technology and work has been protected under licensure for far too long by and for people who are not the actual experts in it." He went on to say how the industry will continue to grow in a lot of areas regardless of licensure and that they feel strongly that they would prevail if the issue ever came up. This person was from a company that is already doing this type of work for private companies, the federal government, and some state governments without licensure. They started by developing the algorithms and software to do this work then started doing the work themselves when they were requested to by the federal government.

It's an interesting point. When we put utility markouts or contours from GIS (either from aerial or satellite) on a map, etc. that information is usually not prepared by or under the supervision of a Surveyor (of course we qualify our certifications in the notes). Does the level of accuracy define it as being covered under licensure or is it just another source of data for us to reference on our maps? Google or any number of tech companies could easily create two foot contours for the entire country without much issue, in fact they could do a lot of what we do cheaper, faster, easier, and likely just as accurate (a friend and I have been having a conversation of how they could do this with property data as well). This is especially true with the modern photogrammetry technology we are starting to see and with the advent of much larger digital cameras allowing higher accuracy from higher flights. Canon announced a 250 megapixel camera sensor which at a height of 1000m and a 17mm lens could cover approximately a 1.7km by 1.1km area in one picture with a GSD of 9cm (about a quarter foot). There are of course a lot of other factors in there to complicate this but there are also sensors and algorithms that can see through trees to get the actual ground elevations and the technology is only advancing. Bump that up to 2000m and you could cover 3.5km x 2.2km with a GSD of 17.5cm. Thats a location every 17.5cm (or every half foot).

All just food for thought. Change is here whether we want/like it or not.

Tom