chris mills, post: 350150, member: 6244 wrote: ....For most ground survey flights you might well spend several hours putting in ground control and verification survey before any thought of flight takes place.....
The surveyor usually sets control panels prior to a conventional air photo flight today, and I assume they also would with drone flights. The surveyor would also still need to pick up obscured details, etc., just as they do with ordinary photogrammetry. I stand by my prediction that most surveyors will hire a drone flying service to do the actual flying. There is, of course, plenty of other stuff to be done by the surveyor to prepare for and complete the process, as you say.
FLS, post: 349311, member: 647 wrote: Has anyone found any uses for a drone for general land surveying?
Not the super high end Lidar type, just a more typical drone.
Thanks
I think that a drone flight would be a very good thing to add value for detailed ALTA commercial surveys like shopping centers.
Back when I worked for a living, we got into doing closing surveys for new Walmart Stores. They were as interested in the striping on the parking lot as any other feature. A good HIGH resolution ortho photo behind your survey would be a value added feature.
The control for UAV work is significantly different to that required for conventional manned flights. While I agree with Mark that surveyors will probably hire in a guy with a drone the results are unlikely to meet expectations. Sure, the heights will be within a foot (or ten) but squeezing the last inch or two out of the photography requires experience of both the control needs and the photogrammetric process. Integrating the activities into one competent team will give the best results - that means one site in a day will be the norm. Eventually, we might see specialist ground control surveyors who do nothing else but the surveying, but it'll take a long time to build up that amount of expertise for the control to be suitable for many types of UAV.
Even when we get to the stage of HIGH-precision on board sensors ground control will always improve the results.