Category Archives: Aerial/UAS
Topcon and GreenValley International Collaborate on Spatial Intelligence Innovations
Topcon Positioning Systems announced it has entered a strategic agreement with GreenValley International (GVI) to collaborate on technologies for surveying, mapping, construction, forestry and other spatial intelligence related applications. Planned innovations will include integrated hardware and software solutions for handheld, aerial, and mobile LiDAR data collection and processing workflows, with developments extending into robotic systems,...
Inventing the Workflow: How Phoenix LiDAR Helped Build the Market It Now Serves
When Grayson Omans, founder and CEO of Phoenix LiDAR Systems, described the company’s transition into its next chapter following the Revolution Geo Systems acquisition, he did not sound like a man delivering a polished exit line. He sounded like someone who had spent years living inside the pressure of building a company and was finally ready...
The Chain That Counts
Four specialists on what actually separates a drone data product from a deliverable a surveyor will stamp The unmanned systems industry has spent a decade getting very good at one thing: flying. The airframes are capable, the sensors are capable, and the regulatory framework, while still evolving, is no longer the primary bottleneck it was...
Teledyne FLIR IIS: The Camera Inside the Stack
When Mike Lee, director of product management for the company’s spherical imaging business, sat down with xyHt at Geo Week 2026, he was not pitching a new workflow platform or a digital twin ecosystem. He was describing a company whose job is to provide a visual sensing layer that other companies’ systems depend on —...
Pix4D’s Platform Moment: From Photogrammetry Engine to Enterprise Reality
Fifteen years into the UAV software revolution, Pix4D’s CTO sees Gaussian splatting, AI-assisted editing, and the smartphone-as-surveying-instrument converging into something bigger than any single tool. When Pix4D was founded in 2011 as a spin-off from EPFL’s Computer Vision Lab in Lausanne, the pitch was essentially this: drones are coming, and someone has to turn the...
The Image as Evidence
Time-stamped, location-aware imagery has quietly crossed a threshold from documentation to trusted record. The geospatial profession is now in the business of producing evidence — and the standards have not caught up to the stakes. A surveyor flying a bridge deck, a GIS technician cataloging post-storm damage, a mapping firm delivering obliques to an insurer:...