Category Archives: Aerial/UAS
Growing Airports with UAVs
Above: AERIUM Analytics conducts Microdrones flights near the Edmonton International Airport control tower. A Canadian UAS provider uses a special UAV with lidar to transform their airport business into supportive infrastructure operations and runway-scanning projects across North America. The skies above Edmonton International Airport (EIA), Canada’s fifth-busiest airport in terms of passengers, are filled with...
Adventures in Droning: Part Two
As you may recall from the last issue of Pangaea, this series is about my experiences using a prosumer-level UAS to explore the possibilities of starting an aerial photography business. Here’s what I learned. Panic over LAANC? As I described in the first article, my first launch of the Spark never left the ground due...
UAV Stakes Out New Ground
Above: A prototype of the Civdrone UAV preparing to drill a stake into the ground. A flying/staking robot has taken a huge step forward in automation for site layout, including road, rail, utilities, and energy applications. Working the traditional way, how many surveyor-days would it take to mark the 300,000 points needed to lay out a...
Harnessing Drones the Photogrammetric Way
Above: The Inspire 2 drone, using a Zenmuse X7 sensor and 16mm lens, captured this high-resolution image of County Line Road in Beavercreek, Ohio. Credit: Woolpert. Considering that UAS are just another platform to carry sensors, new mappers should embrace merging photogrammetric techniques and practices with innovations by the computer-vision community to produce scientifically sound...
Caretographic Representations
In parts of the world where both man-made and natural catastrophes frequently occur, how are geospatial technologies being used? And for those of us whose jobs are to create maps of construction sites and other built-up areas, how can we responsibly use the same technology to monitor destruction and wreckage? I pondered these tough questions...
Many Sensors for a Tulip Tree Map
Above: The forests of Puerto Rico are second-growth, making for useful modeling. After hurricane deforestation in Puerto Rico, NASA scientists study forest regrowth using high-resolution, multi-sensor image data. The Biospheric Laboratory of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is dedicated to increasing knowledge about the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystem. One group of scientists there has been...
