The primary market for deployment for our UAV comes from its ability to map large area’s quickly and accurately. Using state of the art technology with an age old principle known as photogrammetry highly accurate digital maps are created. In a process whereby potentially hundreds of high quality aerial photographs (depending on area to be surveyed) are stitched together using custom software coupled with GPS information collected from an onboard sensor in the UAV, maps with relative and absolute accuracy of up to 10cm’s can be created for almost any area. This complex process results in what’s known as a georeferenced orthomosaic, this is basically a very large aerial photograph that allows distances and areas to be calculated directly from the digital photographs with ease, co-ordinates of every single point on the map can also be generated . This ability allows a multitude of end uses for our maps. Typically aerial surveys from conventional aircraft survey at a resolution of about 1m per pixel, we can survey at 3cm’s per pixel, an unprecedented level of quality. In general accuracy of the survey strongly depends on the flight height, lighting and wind conditions, availability of textures, image quality, overlap, and type of terrain. All surveys are subject to a site suitability survey prior to flying.
Digital Elevation Models or DEM’s
Taking the information gathered from our mapping exercises to another level, DEM’s allow our clients to visualise their project in 3 dimensions. This allows ground profiles, contour maps and potentially even volumes to be calculated using the information generated from the DEM. This information can be become a valuable resource for our Clients when either developing projects or monitoring sensitive areas such as those suffering from coastal erosion. The video demonstrates these abilites: