surveying and mapping

Drone data collection, surveying, and infrastructure inspection company Soaring Eagle Technologies has added another Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) waiver to its collection – this one permitting virtually unlimited geographic range of mission operation.

Dutch company DeltaQuad is looking to shake up drone design – and through that, increase both performance and mission diversity – with its new Evo electric takeoff and landing (eVTOL) craft that bears more than a passing resemblance to the B2-Stealth aircraft.

Drone giant DJI has released a new version of its Terra 3D modeling and mapping software, adding new functionality, enhancing existing features, and sorting out a series of bugs.

Score another drones-for-good point for Australia’s UAV and geospatial education provider SheMaps, whose aerial tech introduction and training have led a young Queensland woman to take to the skies in an effort to safeguard the history of the Aboriginal Koko-Muluridji people’s Wallara clan.

UAV sensor specialist Censys Technologies has closed an over-subscribed Series A Funding round that generated $8.3 million ­– capital the company will use to accelerate its transformation from a drone services company to a provider of what it calls airborne intelligence.

Aerial geophysical mapping specialist Overhead Intelligence has used a drone equipped with Iris Automation safety avionics tech to operate a combined extended visual line of sight (EVLOS) and beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) magnetometer survey mission over a wide area of Canadian mineral deposits.

Australia and its ever-booming economy are being hampered by its construction sector suffering from continued pandemic fallout, supply chain disruption, rising material prices, and a deepening shortage of skilled labor. As a remedy to that latter problem, a national education business is using drone technology in classroom-level instruction to encourage students to navigate those aerial assets into surveying careers.

If a single person were to be designed the “Drone Meister” of US government aerial operations, it might well be Mark Bathrick – the recently retired director of the Department of the Interior’s Office of Aviation Services (OAS), who assembled and oversaw the increasingly diversified use of the world’s largest fleet of non-military UAS. Creator of the agency’s “Drones for Good” program, Bathrick spoke to DroneDJ about how those operations evolved over the past two decades and how it’s likely to continue in the future.

Drone maker DJI’s update-o-rama continued Wednesday with the release of (yet another) firmware upgrade ­– this time for the Mini 2 – and a new version of its DJI Terra uber-mapping solution. Those two bring the company’s software revisions to five this week alone.

Swiss vertical takeoff and landing aircraft company Wingtra will be giving away three WingtraOne drones as prizes in its new Earth Day Challenge, whose winners will be selected on the merits of their proposed environmental or humanitarian projects.

Autonomous drone mapping startup Emesent has announced its latest survey-grade LiDAR payload: Hovermap ST. The lightweight, IP65-rated solution is being launched with Emesent’s new Automated Ground Control feature that, the company stresses, enables autonomous data capture in harsher environments than ever and for a wider range of use cases.

Ordnance Survey (OS), the national mapping agency for Great Britain, has decided to incorporate Altitude Angel’s aeronautical data into its in-house survey planning software. The information will help the geospatial experts at OS determine whether it’s better to carry out a survey using a drone, or if it’s more appropriate for one of the agency’s 230 surveyors to get their boots on the ground.

Convergence in the high-end mapping and 3D-modeling drone services segment is afoot with the acquisition of LiDAR tech specialist GeoCue by the mdGroup, owner of Germany-based Microdrones.

XAG, one of the top three commercial drone manufacturers of 2021, has launched five new products that will become available globally in 2022. And as was expected, XAG’s new autonomous solutions, which include both drones and ground robots, pack in more efficiency, precision, and safety than the company’s previous models.

Custodians of the Seaford Head coastal cliffs in southeast England know loss of their archeologically important site to erosion and rising sea levels is a question of when, not if, and as a result are using drones and other digital technology to thoroughly map and model the area before it’s gone.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said it will begin deploying a gamma ray-reading drone to monitor former uranium mining and processing sites in Central Asia. The airborne surveys will permit accurate analysis of the radioactive zones that human researchers have had to wade through until now.

A drone survey funded by McDonald’s has revealed the sordid scale of Britain’s trash problem. When rubbish-mapping drones scanned the coastal resort towns of Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole (BCP Council) in the month of May, it was discovered that littering had increased by 454% compared to the volumes found during the March lockdown.

Swiss Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) drone maker Wingtra and data visualization and analysis specialist Propeller Aero are teaming up to offer a precision 3D mapping and surveying platform for industrial clients.