A Surveyor’s Guide to Drones: How to

Get the Job Done Faster Without

Compromising on Accuracy (Part 2)
Part Two—Software

Following on from our previous article, which covered selecting the right hardware for your
surveying operations, today we’ll be covering the actual flight, plus how to process and use
the data.

Flight Planning Apps

You’ll want to get a flight planning app to get the drone to autonomously fly and take all of
the required pictures, so you can just keep an eye on it, rather than having to fly the drone
around and manually take photos. Even flight paths also lead to much better quality data.

Mission planning using a GS Pro app

There are plenty of apps available that do a great job of this. We recommend DJI’s GS Pro
app, but if you’re already using another app and it is working well, just keep using that.

Processing / Measurement / Visualization Software

Once you have all of your photos and ground control data, you need software to stitch the
images together, powerful machines and a data expert to pin the images to the ground
control positions and guarantee a high level of accuracy.

Again there are many options available in this space, with several considerations to make.
These are outlined below.

Working in Agriculture or Farming?

If you’re doing anything like scanning crops with NDVI, etc., we recommend using Drone
Deploy or PrecisionHawk. Both companies are focused heavily on agriculture.

Desktop or Cloud?

Processing photogrammetry is a resource intensive process and also requires a high level of
technical knowledge from the person running it. This means that you need powerful
machines and the time of skilled personnel to run it (data expert/surveyors that know to run
them). Both of these are expensive, and both are difficult to scale up with your business.

The real question here is how much of your and your team’s time will be required to process
your current and future workload every day, and would that time be better spent doing other
work?

Desktop processing usually works well when starting out or when just processing data from a
single site or drone, but if you are trying to deal with multiple surveys simultaneously this
method typically does not scale well.

The answers to these questions almost always point toward cloud computing, which is why
we recommend using it. Cloud-based applications in general are the most cost effective way
of leveraging powerful computing power that scales well with your business and requires no
installation nor maintenance on your end.

That said, if you are set on processing locally, have the time and resources to spend on
processing data, the skills to do so and you aren’t expecting any rapid growth in your
business in the foreseeable future, we recommend using Pix4D for your processing. Propeller
can accept the files generated in Pix4D so you can continue to use our platform for
collaboration and sharing.
Flexibility

There is no single platform that does everything well, therefore it’s important to make sure
that the software you choose is fit for your particular purpose. The one-stop-shop
photogrammetry solution does not exist yet.

This is why flexibility is so important.

Make sure that whatever software you go with is able to import and export major file formats
and work in your coordinate reference system(s) so that you can use each of your tools
without getting all of your data stuck in one of them (data silos).

For instance, you need this flexibility so that you can work with your business’s/clients’
existing CAD/geospatial packages like Esri’s ArcGIS and Global Mapper, etc.

Also, it’s important that your software is not linked to any particular drone. Drone technology
is rapidly progressing, and it’s vital that your software can work with new drones as they
come out so you can take advantage of longer flight times, better navigation and new
features that make your workflow easier.

3D Measurements

You’ll quickly learn that 3D scans aren’t very useful if you can’t do 3D measurements, such
as:

Topographic contour profiles

Surface distances
Cross sectional profile
Grades and slopes
3D volumetrics (stockpile measurement, drop cut estimations, etc.)

If any of these measurements are important to you, make sure you check that the software
you purchase can perform them.
3D volumetrics and cross-sectional measurements on the Propeller Platform

Ease of Use

Having a platform that is easy to use is essential to being able to train new people quickly
and ensuring enduring capability of your team without the need for “experts” or “gurus” who
have managed to figure out how to use it.

This may sound obvious, but it’s a surprisingly common problem.

To assess this, we recommend getting an online demo of any software you’re planning on
using before you purchase it.

Accuracy

Having the right tools for a job is important, although if you don’t have the right people using
those tools it’s just as bad.
Make sure that whoever is processing your data (whether local or cloud-based) is an expert in
the field. Depending on your selected software and each particular scenario, this can mean
the difference between accurate, useful data and potentially unusable data.

Conclusion

At the start of this series, we mentioned that commercial drones and cloud software are
biggest change to surveying since GPS. Keep in mind that the technology available is
continuously improving, so keep up with the drone news and major product announcements.

If you’re working in construction, mining, aggregates, or waste management industry, we

suggest you also view the Propeller Platform demo and check if this site intelligence solution
can fit into your existing workflows.

Got any questions? Reach out to us for more information.

You might also like:

Picking The Best Hardware and Software for Your Drone Program

Why is DJI’s Phantom 4 RTK the Drone of the Future?

How PPK Drone Surveying Works