Leading Civil UAV Pioneers Join Forces

Two pioneers of ultralight drones for civil use, senseFly (Switzerland) and Parrot (France), have joined forces to further develop their respective markets. Parrot has sold over 300,000 of its AR.drone quadcopters to the consumer market since its release in 2010, while the Swiss start-up senseFly has seen fast, global growth in demand for its fixed-wing drones for the mapping and GIS market. senseFly already masters all the key technologies of its mapping solution: autopilot design, control & monitoring software, and hardware integration. Today, its complete solution includes the swinglet CAM: ultralight flying drone equipped with a high-resolution camera and senseFly’s... (read more)

2012-07-27 04:13:02

UAV Technology and Trends at Intergeo

UAVs are playing an increasing role in the surveying industry thanks to their ever-improving sensors and their ever-lighter weight, allowing them to remain in the air for longer. They can complete surveying and inspection tasks that would otherwise be difficult to tackle and do so with cost-efficiency. UAV trends and technology will be amongst the focal points at the Intergeo conference in Berlin, Germany, on 7 October 2014. Jan Denzel is a research assistant at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Aircraft Design (IFB). He is part of the UAV research group that developed a fully electric helicopter UAV some... (read more)

2014-08-27 08:30:00

GerMAP Launches New Aerial Mapping UAV

G170-V, a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), is the latest UAV German-based GerMAP has added to the remote sensing and aerial mapping market. G170-V ideally combines the easiness of manual or automatic vertical take-off and landing procedures of multicopters with the area coverage efficiency of aeroplanes. With its 20MP RGB-camera the G170-V covers areas up to 25ha in about 20 minutes maintaining close to 3cm ground sampling distance (GSD) from 100m above ground level (AGL) and delivering autopilot-triggered, location-based aerial imagery with 80% along track and 70% across track image overlaps. G170-V's flight control automatically... (read more)

2016-12-12 09:30:15

senseFly to Host UAV Webinar for Surveyors

senseFly, the Switzerland-based producer of professional mapping UAVs, will host an educational webinar on the applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for professional surveying and mapping. Two experienced commercial operators will discuss how they deployed UAVs in the mapping phases of major infrastructure development projects. The one-hour webinar, “Drone Surveying 101 – Experienced Operators Discuss Cost, Achievable Accuracy, Workflows and More,” will be held on Wednesday, 16 November at 10 a.m. EST/16:00 CET. There is no charge to attend, but attendees must register in advance here. How to use UAVs Thousands of geospatial professionals have already turned to drone technology,... (read more)

2016-11-10 10:51:04

Turning UAV and Lidar into Something Beautiful

YellowScan International User Conference 2017

Mounting Lidar on an unmanned airborne vehicle (UAV) is regarded by many as the next geospatial frontier, but gradually the barriers are being overcome. Scientists and Lidar- and UAV-adopters from surveying companies gathered at the second YellowScan User Conference in Montpellier, France, to discuss the future of this novel and promising geodata acquisition technology. The diverse backgrounds of the over 80 attendees reflect the potential of equipping UAVs with Lidar sensors, resulting in what may be called UAS-Lidar. The venue – Château de Flaugergues, built between 1696 and 1730 – added an extra dimension to the two-day conference, held on 29... (read more)

2017-07-26 11:13:46

Enabling UAV-based 3D Mapping

Pix4D

Pix4D has developed next-generation software that automatically combines raw images captured by lightweight Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to produce accurate measurements and visualisation of the environment. This enables timely, on-demand local 3D mapping. What if images taken by consumer-grade cameras could be combined to compute accurate 3D environments? This is the question that prompted Dr Christoph Strecha’s research 10 years ago. Back then, the first megapixel cameras were just starting to appear on the consumer market. Christoph’s research led to the development of techniques to produce 3D reconstructions in a fully automated way from a set of standard digital images.... (read more)

2012-06-29 04:58:34

Precise Positioning: The Future of UAV Mapping

The geospatial industry has seen exponential growth in the adoption of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or ‘drone’) solutions in recent years, particularly in surveying and mapping applications. Photogrammetry has recovered from a decline during the analogue era and benefited massively from the light digital sensors on versatile UAVs. Innovative technologies and more integrated, customer-friendly solutions have enabled photogrammetry to stay on the radar of industry professionals. Today, photogrammetry is increasingly capable of meeting demands for faster, more precise and efficient data collection. At the turn of the century, the survival of photogrammetry depended on its ability to adapt in the... (read more)

2018-03-07 02:51:41

Vertical Technologies Launches New VTOL UAV

Vertical Technologies has released its DeltaQuad series of autonomous VTOL UAVs. This hybrid vertical-take-off fixed-wing UAV can stream telemetry and video over the cellular network using VPN, and boasts a 1kg payload capacity, flight time of 2 hours 45 minutes and 150km range. The DeltaQuad is developed by members of the PX4 Pro autopilot development team and uses several innovative features that aims to make this UAV as easy to control as setting up a navigation system. It requires no pre-flight calibrations and the Pro model comes equipped with an on-board computer that almost completely replaces the operator, making the... (read more)

2017-09-05 09:30:53

First Authorised Urban UAV Flight in Italy

The Anteos RPA of the Italian company Aermatica is the only UAV that has obtained permission to fly in non-segregated airspace from the Italian Civil Aviation Authority (ENAC). As a result, Aermatica and GEOMATICA_LAB from the University of L’Aquila have agreed a collaboration regarding photogrammetric surveys. The first survey was carried out on 4 April 2013 and involved one of the most important churches damaged during the last earthquake: the Basilica di S.M. di Collemaggio in L’Aquila. The purpose of this first activity was to elaborate on and update the data on the status of this Basilica, which will be... (read more)

2013-05-08 08:30:00

Sharing Experiences at The Commercial UAV Show

On 21 and 22 October 2014, the Olympia venue in London, UK, played host to the very first edition of The Commercial UAV Show. Around 55 exhibitors and 1,700 visitors arrived in London to learn more about UAVs and the various types of payloads, to network and to share their experiences. For geomatics professionals there was plenty to see and hear, both at the stands and at the seminars that were being held during the event. (By Wim van Wegen, editorial manager, GIM International) Lucy Bradley from Terrapinn, organiser of the event, explained that The Commercial UAV Show responds to... (read more)

2014-10-28 01:47:13