Drones for Aerial Images or RTK

Jim Campi

Active Member
Do you gents use a drone to capture aerial imagery for ultra-up-to-date background images for your surveys? Do any of you use a drone with RTK for preparing topos of larger parcels or for other types of surveys? If so, can you discuss what you are using?

I know this discussion will be related to non-Javad survey hardware. I hope that isn't an issue discussing here...
 

TonyC

Member
I use a Phantom 4 RTK drone, but I prefer to use it in PPK mode with the base station located nearby. For topographic work, it works best on bare ground since it does not have any lidar capabilities.
 

A.lacey

Member
We use a DJI phantom 4 pro. I set targets down and locate them. i use a program called agisoft to process the photos and move to the state plane coordinates. It allows me to produce point clouds, 3D view, and orthomosaic photos. this allows use to import the photo directly into cad
 

Matthew D. Sibole

Well-Known Member
5PLS
I have used phantom 3 professional both for topo and just the background aerial. It works well but is time consuming for the image processing for non RTK or PPK applications. (You have to select each target in every photo they appear in. For instance the last one I did, I only used 4 targets. I had to zoom into each target 38 times at the height I was flying. You also need a pretty hefty computer for the processing.
 

nusouthsc

Active Member
We use the drone for larger as-builts . It is also very nice for very busy road intersections. As Matt said, it is time consuming for processing. We use Autodesk ReCap and its cloud based so you upload your images and then download the files once processing is completed. For a larger flight it can several hours to upload. I do it before I leave work and the next morning it is finished. To me, its one of those things that you don't realize how you can use it until you have one and use it. You can get creative and find applications you wouldn't normally think of. They are relatively cheap but software is the kicker.
 

A.lacey

Member
I use a Phantom 4 RTK drone, but I prefer to use it in PPK mode with the base station located nearby. For topographic work, it works best on bare ground since it does not have any lidar capabilities.
how hard is it to add info from javad? we are thinking of upgrading to a rtk drone.
 
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