The Drone Survey Mapping Business. Simple questions, but never covered in the tutorials I watched. I hope someone can help me. Thanks in advance.

[SteveR43]

I want to start a Drone mapping surveying service. My hope is to just do one job every week or 2, just for a little pocket money. 107 certified owner of Mav3 Enterprise w RTK. I plan on using the local governments NTRIP RTK Reference Network to get RTK accuracy. I don't have the equipment to create Ground Control Points (GCPs). I'm going to depend on the local government's NTRIP Reference Ground Network.

For post surveying analysis, I will be using my own desk top, not the cloud. Will a desktop with a 3970X AMD Threadripper 32 core 64 thread CPU and a 4090 Nvidia GTX 24gb video memory be adequate?

The biggest questions are what is the client going to want? I.E. what final product or "deliverable" materials is the client expecting to receive? Let's say I am surveying a construction site for example?

No tutorials seem to discuss this part in any depth.

Software recommendations and any other advice would be appreciated.
Oh, do I need to be licensed as a surveyor?

Thanks.

 

[MikeGilley]

I want to start a Drone mapping surveying service. My hope is to just do one job every week or 2, just for a little pocket money. 107 certified owner of Mav3 Enterprise w RTK. I plan on using the local governments NTRIP RTK Reference Network to get RTK accuracy. I don't have the equipment to create Ground Control Points (GCPs). I'm going to depend on the local government's NTRIP Reference Ground Network.

For post surveying analysis, I will be using my own desk top, not the cloud. Will a desktop with a 3970X AMD Threadripper 32 core 64 thread CPU and a 4090 Nvidia GTX 24gb video memory be adequate?

The biggest questions are what is the client going to want? I.E. what final product or "deliverable" materials is the client expecting to receive? Let's say I am surveying a construction site for example?

No tutorials seem to discuss this part in any depth.

Software recommendations and any other advice would be appreciated.
Oh, do I need to be licensed as a surveyor?

Thanks.

Some of the deliverables that a client might want that could be produced with a drone/camera could include: a Digital Surface Model, a Digital Elevation Model, a Digital Terrain Model. There may be interest in that DSM/DEM/DTM photogrammetry models being incorporated into a Geographic Information System (GIS) such as ESRI ArcGIS as another "layer" in their model of geographical areas of interest.

Regarding your question on hardware adequacy to do processing: That's hard to answer until decision about the whole workflow and software tool chain is decided. There are many, many tools: ARC GIS Drone2Map, Pix4D, DroneDeploy, DJI Terra, etc. Every decision you make will result in a set of constraints you need to navigate. Each of the tools I noted has compatibility with specific operating systems and hardware configurations. Some apps may not leverage all of the cores/threads nor the Nvidia GPU. And while most processing tools will support processing any collection of geotagged images, the automation of the flight/data collection is generally constrained to very specific drone models and drone camera payloads.

You certainly don't need to be a civil engineer or even a licensed surveyor to fly a drone on a photogrammetry mission and to produce work products. But you might need to work with one overseeing your work in order to ensure you're collecting data and producing work products that meet the accuracy, quality, and spatial detail level for a job. Also, I think you will need GCPs so that you can make corrections to your data that impact the geospatial accuracy and overall quality of the work product. Maybe your prospective customers or a service provider that you partner/subcontract with can help you set GCPs for a project. RTK does not eliminate the need for GCPs.

Here's my advice: Find someone people that are doing the kind of work you're thinking about and ask them questions about their education and experience. Talk to prospective customers about what kind of deliverables they typically need and what qualifications they expect service providers to have. Find someone doing the work that could be a mentor to you. I'm a big proponent of education and on the job training/mentoring. Put your energy towards learning--preferably through a structured program that culminates in a degree, certificate, and/or license that you'll need to do the job you want to do. Unless you have money to burn, you might defer decisions about all of the technology parts until after you know what you want to produce.


Best of luck to you!

Mike Gilley/Fox River Systems

 

[SteveR43]

Some of the deliverables that a client might want that could be produced with a drone/camera could include: a Digital Surface Model, a Digital Elevation Model, a Digital Terrain Model. There may be interest in that DSM/DEM/DTM photogrammetry models being incorporated into a Geographic Information System (GIS) such as ESRI ArcGIS as another "layer" in their model of geographical areas of interest.

Regarding your question on hardware adequacy to do processing: That's hard to answer until decision about the whole workflow and software tool chain is decided. There are many, many tools: ARC GIS Drone2Map, Pix4D, DroneDeploy, DJI Terra, etc. Every decision you make will result in a set of constraints you need to navigate. Each of the tools I noted has compatibility with specific operating systems and hardware configurations. Some apps may not leverage all of the cores/threads nor the Nvidia GPU. And while most processing tools will support processing any collection of geotagged images, the automation of the flight/data collection is generally constrained to very specific drone models and drone camera payloads.

You certainly don't need to be a civil engineer or even a licensed surveyor to fly a drone on a photogrammetry mission and to produce work products. But you might need to work with one overseeing your work in order to ensure you're collecting data and producing work products that meet the accuracy, quality, and spatial detail level for a job. Also, I think you will need GCPs so that you can make corrections to your data that impact the geospatial accuracy and overall quality of the work product. Maybe your prospective customers or a service provider that you partner/subcontract with can help you set GCPs for a project. RTK does not eliminate the need for GCPs.

Here's my advice: Find someone people that are doing the kind of work you're thinking about and ask them questions about their education and experience. Talk to prospective customers about what kind of deliverables they typically need and what qualifications they expect service providers to have. Find someone doing the work that could be a mentor to you. I'm a big proponent of education and on the job training/mentoring. Put your energy towards learning--preferably through a structured program that culminates in a degree, certificate, and/or license that you'll need to do the job you want to do. Unless you have money to burn, you might defer decisions about all of the technology parts until after you know what you want to produce.


Best of luck to you!

Mike Gilley/Fox River Systems

Thank you so much. You helped greatly.

 

[Pilot Adam]

I want to start a Drone mapping surveying service. My hope is to just do one job every week or 2, just for a little pocket money. 107 certified owner of Mav3 Enterprise w RTK. I plan on using the local governments NTRIP RTK Reference Network to get RTK accuracy. I don't have the equipment to create Ground Control Points (GCPs). I'm going to depend on the local government's NTRIP Reference Ground Network.

For post surveying analysis, I will be using my own desk top, not the cloud. Will a desktop with a 3970X AMD Threadripper 32 core 64 thread CPU and a 4090 Nvidia GTX 24gb video memory be adequate?

The biggest questions are what is the client going to want? I.E. what final product or "deliverable" materials is the client expecting to receive? Let's say I am surveying a construction site for example?

No tutorials seem to discuss this part in any depth.

Software recommendations and any other advice would be appreciated.
Oh, do I need to be licensed as a surveyor?

Thanks.

Hello,

Your Mavic 3 Enterprise should cover your work needs. I use a Mavic 2 Pro mostly for mapping as such. It depends on how in-depth you are surveying for the customer's needs.
Best of luck to you!

 

[Jonduav]

I want to start a Drone mapping surveying service. My hope is to just do one job every week or 2, just for a little pocket money. 107 certified owner of Mav3 Enterprise w RTK. I plan on using the local governments NTRIP RTK Reference Network to get RTK accuracy. I don't have the equipment to create Ground Control Points (GCPs). I'm going to depend on the local government's NTRIP Reference Ground Network.

For post surveying analysis, I will be using my own desk top, not the cloud. Will a desktop with a 3970X AMD Threadripper 32 core 64 thread CPU and a 4090 Nvidia GTX 24gb video memory be adequate?

The biggest questions are what is the client going to want? I.E. what final product or "deliverable" materials is the client expecting to receive? Let's say I am surveying a construction site for example?

No tutorials seem to discuss this part in any depth.

Software recommendations and any other advice would be appreciated.
Oh, do I need to be licensed as a surveyor?

Thanks.

Hi Steve

How has your venture gone? I wanted to provide some feedback before I saw the post date, so figured I would rather ask an update since I've also been testing what feels like every single bit of software out there.