Construction Site Mapping

Last night was a long night.  After returning from two mapping jobs in Astoria I arrived home to begin processing a half acre construction site for my partner BD Aerial.  This site was near the Hillsboro airport so Brian had to use some innovative techniques for capture that did not require flying… He came up with a wild idea, that I can’t describe here out of respect for his creativity, but it managed to work.  He had to manually trigger frames during capture instead of automated capture during a typical DJI GS Pro mission.  This resulted in far more photos than I was used to processing in a 24hr time frame for them.  In addition, the client needed the data to make a decision before moving forward with construction in the morning.  This meant that instead of the full 24hrs from capture (around noon) I had to work throughout the night and with rushed processing settings to get something out in time.  Basically, I had 3x the number of photos I typically process for a construction site, half the time to process it that I usually have, and had the added difficulty of using a local coordinate system with minimal surveyed ground control. 

Well, I was able to pull it off by staying up literally all night to ensure nothing crashed and because the drone was capturing frames at a very low altitude we achieved the highest spatial resolution I have processed yet at 0.09in/pixel and insane accuracy of 0.16 in X, 0.08 in Y and 0.32 in Z!  This accuracy of course were achievable by using a local system and the amazing accuracy possible with laser siting of a total station on site.  

Wish I could share a photo but this work was done for BD Aerial so I can’t.