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Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

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Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#21

Post by JulianMorrison »

dougmccune wrote: post #15
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.

The laws would have to change to allow you to fly these over populated areas. There's a reason the blog post is about flying over someone's private farmland. As a commercial company you can't even charge a farmer to fly over his land, the owner of the land has to do it himself.

Attach transient, disposable cameras with precise positioning to wide-ranging self-piloting lifeforms not subject to FAA approval, such as city pigeons.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#22

Post by malandrew »

dougmccune wrote: post #15
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.

The laws would have to change to allow you to fly these over populated areas. There's a reason the blog post is about flying over someone's private farmland. As a commercial company you can't even charge a farmer to fly over his land, the owner of the land has to do it himself.

Easy solution. Don't charge the farmer to photograph his land. Instead charge to rent the drones to the farmer so he can "fly them himself" with supervision. Just code up an interface that gives him a big green "Go" button that sets off the actual flyover sequence.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#23

Post by ChuckMcM »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #21
dougmccune wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws would have to change to allow you to fly these over populated areas. There's a reason the blog post is about flying over someone's private farmland. As a commercial company you can't even charge a farmer to fly over his land, the owner of the land has to do it himself.

Attach transient, disposable cameras with precise positioning to wide-ranging self-piloting lifeforms not subject to FAA approval, such as city pigeons.

While you may be kidding, such a thing with a drive by upload to a local wifi network might be possible (no opinion on practical) but basically a camera, gps module, altimiter, and wifi link. Put feeding stations on Starbucks or near other free WiFi hotspots that dispense seed if the leg unit uploads a picture.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#24

Post by ris »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #18

Does anyone know a free alternative to Pix4D (the image stitching software)? I'd love to try this myself.

No. An OpenStreetMapper has come up with his own rather less sophisticated pipeline for doing this sort of work:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Balrog/Aerial_Imager...

but it's a way off what this software seems to be able to do.

There's not much magic in what Pix4D does - the algorithms are generally well documented (though tricky to get to work well from what I understand), it's just no-one's done it yet.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#25

Post by jamesaguilar »

b_emery wrote: post #11
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.

Not sure what you get for $12k, but know that it is possible to build an autonomous airplane, and a gopro for much less than that. Here's a friend's video for evidence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX3kFWoH17o&feature=c4-overvi... His cost is order $2000.

You can do it for less than that, even. A Naza M flight controller costs $200 (http://www.uavproducts.com/product.php?id_product=21), and that's one of the more expensive controllers out there. The remainder of the components for a flying wing would run you $80-$120. You could replace the Naza M with a multiwii controller and write your own flight control program for much less. These are multicopter components but there are analogous components for gliders and planes. Then there's the GoPro, a used one of which might cost $150. I guess you can do this for an all-in price of less than $600.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#26

Post by VladRussian2 »

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.

> $12,000 - too steep for a hobbyist

market segmentation. They used the "industrial" keyword. So it could have been anything between $300 for Parrot and $35K (airframe only, the whole system is $200K+) for Raven.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#27

Post by repsilat »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #21
dougmccune wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws would have to change to allow you to fly these over populated areas. There's a reason the blog post is about flying over someone's private farmland. As a commercial company you can't even charge a farmer to fly over his land, the owner of the land has to do it himself.

Attach transient, disposable cameras with precise positioning to wide-ranging self-piloting lifeforms not subject to FAA approval, such as city pigeons.

Here's an interesting idea: drones as really autonomous entities. A script with a bitcoin account sells aerial imagery to mapping companies and uses the proceeds to pay for its own hosting and for the upkeep of its drone. It's a company that really lives "in the cloud(s)".

In our present legal environment I guess the creator would still be charged with breaking the FAA regulations, but perhaps we'll live to see the day when our children will be held responsible for their own actions :)

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#28

Post by callmeed »

This is so cool.

I'd really like to do a drone services startup focusing on municipal govt's and agriculture. It seems like you could solve a lot of surveying/permitting issues for cities. With ag, special cameras can give farms a lot of data (I know this is being done already). I think becoming sort of the "Waste Management for Drones" could make a lot of money.

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#29

Post by 616c »

I live abroad and was considering pitching this as a low-cost alternative to satellite imagery and crowd-sourcing with the the government GIS teams and national computer research center ehre. Very, very cool to see it in action!

Re: Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap

#30

Post by awor »

I used to work for a mineral exploration company that purchased an Ebee in the spring, and used it heavily this summer in Northern Canada (mountainous, extremely remote terrain). It's a pretty neat unit and only required about 1-2 hours of reading the manual and making a quick flight plan before we were ready to fly it. The software that ships with it is super duper easy to figure out. Though it may be too simple as some of the control we would have liked wasn't there.

That said, the gov't paperwork before we were able to fly it was a nightmare, but operating it in remote, helicopter access only areas (no humans/buildings/etc around for dozens and dozens of kilometres) did ease the requirements a tiny bit.

Generating DSMs from the geo-ref'd images within an hour or two of flying a flight plan was pretty awesome though. Being DSM (Rather than DTM/DEM) is kind of annoying with tree-cover, but in less treed areas is still better than the Government of Canada 30m DEM.

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