Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#1

Post by bsudekum » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 8:10 PM UTC

Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap
mapbox.com

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#2

Post by ville » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 8:51 PM UTC

This is very cool. TileMill (https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill) is also one of the most amazing open source web apps I've seen for a while.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#3

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 8:57 PM UTC

This is insanely cool, and a bit crazy too. 45 minutes to map 10km^2, so two of them, swapping out batteries, you're talking one person mapping 90 km^2 a day. So a city like San Francisco (121 km^2) in a couple of days? Or San Jose (467 km^2) in a week? That is pretty interesting. Make your own map with license to your own assets pretty reasonably I'd guess.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#4

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 9:06 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

This is insanely cool, and a bit crazy too. 45 minutes to map 10km^2, so two of them, swapping out batteries, you're talking one person mapping 90 km^2 a day. So a city like San Francisco (121 km^2) in a couple of days? Or San Jose (467 km^2) in a week? That is pretty interesting. Make your own map with license to your own assets pretty reasonably I'd guess.

45 minutes to capture the imagery. Also, 100 acres is 0.4 km^2.

In the U.S., the big advantage over government imagery is going to be timeliness. I'm sure some people also have uses for the resolution.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#5

Post by uptown » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 9:13 PM UTC

Completely awesome. I was curious so I looked up the eBee price. $12,000 - too steep for a hobbyist, but I'm sure that price will come down over time as drones become more widespread.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#6

Post by MPetitt » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 9:14 PM UTC

I was really bummed when I read that one of these costs about 12k. But then I realized how much money you could make taking this around the country, mapping out cities and licensing the images out. Heck, just taking private gigs for colleges, estates, parks, and things of that sort could make you good money. I think i found a new side business.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#7

Post by senthilnayagam » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 9:15 PM UTC

volunteers with army of drones can can cover cities, there can be a kickstarter for each city funded by its resident. I will fund for chennai and bangalore for sure

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#8

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 9:18 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #4

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

This is insanely cool, and a bit crazy too. 45 minutes to map 10km^2, so two of them, swapping out batteries, you're talking one person mapping 90 km^2 a day. So a city like San Francisco (121 km^2) in a couple of days? Or San Jose (467 km^2) in a week? That is pretty interesting. Make your own map with license to your own assets pretty reasonably I'd guess.

45 minutes to capture the imagery. Also, 100 acres is 0.4 km^2. In the U.S., the big advantage over government imagery is going to be timeliness. I'm sure some people also have uses for the resolution.

I was going by this:

"The eBee has a flight time of up to 45 minutes allowing to cover areas of up to 10sqkm in a single flight." -- http://www.sensefly.com/drones/ebee.html

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#9

Post by ris » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 9:19 PM UTC

If only we didn't have to rely on nonfree software for the processing.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#10

Post by nwh » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 9:32 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #5

Completely awesome. I was curious so I looked up the eBee price. $12,000 - too steep for a hobbyist, but I'm sure that price will come down over time as drones become more widespread.

Man that's expensive. You could probably build something similar on a quadrocopter base for a tenth of that. Not a lot to the thing when you look at it.