Tag Archives: uas
Above the Mud
An orthographic image of the exposed spillway at Geode State Park in Iowa at 1″ ground sample distance. To improve water quality in a 500-acre state park, drones are key for surveying drained lakes and the surrounding watershed. Improving water quality is a key part of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ (DNR) mission. Planning...
More Than Just Autopilot
Your UAS flight management system affects accuracy in photogrammetry, so get to know what you need. Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are arguably the most disruptive technology introduced to the geospatial profession since GPS. Advances in UAS capabilities and in photogrammetry software have significantly reduced the barrier to generating digital surface models (DSM) and orthomosaics from...
Cooperative Effort Takes Off
Tapping into UAS technology creates possibilities for a northern Arizona utility. Sometimes, the most effective, revelatory, progressive solutions to a problem can be found in the unlikeliest of places. Case in point: three and a half hours north of Phoenix in the city of Lakeside, Arizona, an electric cooperative that serves more than 33,000 member...
Tunnel Monitoring from Above
UAV digital monitoring delivers significant benefits as part of a major German tunneling construction project. The German city of Karlsruhe plays a decisive role in transport planning in the southwest of that country, with more than 300,000 inhabitants, 160,000 vehicles in the main part of the city, and 190 million train passengers every year. Highway...
BVLOS
Beyond visual line of sight is the next frontier for UAVs. The FFA’s Part 107 rule allows for routine civil operation of small unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAV) in the National Airspace System (NAS) and provides safety rules for those operations. Since this implementation almost two years ago, more than 70,000 drone pilot applications have been...
Assessing the Potential
UAS-based Topobathymetric Lidar Surveys Understanding stream channel and floodplain morphology is critical for a number of efforts—from hydraulic modeling and stream-restoration design to aquatic habitat assessment. These applications require description of conditions both inside the channels and in the adjacent riparian zones. Gathering these data has typically relied on individuals on the ground or in...
