
Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap - bsudekum
https://www.mapbox.com/blog/drone-imagery-openstreetmap/
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ChuckMcM
This is insanely cool, and a bit crazy too. 45 minutes to map 10km^2, so two
of them, swapping out batteries, you're talking one person mapping 90 km^2 a
day. So a city like San Francisco (121 km^2) in a couple of days? Or San Jose
(467 km^2) in a week? That is pretty interesting. Make your own map with
license to your own assets pretty reasonably I'd guess.

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dougmccune
The laws would have to change to allow you to fly these over populated areas.
There's a reason the blog post is about flying over someone's private
farmland. As a commercial company you can't even charge a farmer to fly over
his land, the owner of the land has to do it himself.

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JulianMorrison
Attach transient, disposable cameras with precise positioning to wide-ranging
self-piloting lifeforms not subject to FAA approval, such as city pigeons.

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ChuckMcM
While you may be kidding, such a thing with a drive by upload to a local wifi
network might be possible (no opinion on practical) but basically a camera,
gps module, altimiter, and wifi link. Put feeding stations on Starbucks or
near other free WiFi hotspots that dispense seed if the leg unit uploads a
picture.

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ville
This is very cool. TileMill
([https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill](https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill)) is
also one of the most amazing open source web apps I've seen for a while.

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uptown
Completely awesome. I was curious so I looked up the eBee price. $12,000 - too
steep for a hobbyist, but I'm sure that price will come down over time as
drones become more widespread.

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nwh
Man that's expensive. You could probably build something similar on a
quadrocopter base for a tenth of that. Not a lot to the thing when you look at
it.

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scoot
A multi-rotor will ccurrently only give you 10-15 mins flight time with a
payload. There are cheaper options (than the OP) that are also more practical.

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jlev
Folks have been doing this for years, and for cheaper, with balloons and
kites. Check out the awesome work at publiclab.org, where they've mapped the
gulf oil spill in 2010, pollution at the Gowanus canal, Occupy encampments.
Stitch the photos with the OSS Ruby tools at mapknitter.org, publish them with
a public domain license, and they'll actually be added to the google base map!

Buy a kit for < $100: [http://store.publiclab.org/products/balloon-mapping-
kit](http://store.publiclab.org/products/balloon-mapping-kit)

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ris
If only we didn't have to rely on nonfree software for the processing.

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awor
I used to work for a mineral exploration company that purchased an Ebee in the
spring, and used it heavily this summer in Northern Canada (mountainous,
extremely remote terrain). It's a pretty neat unit and only required about 1-2
hours of reading the manual and making a quick flight plan before we were
ready to fly it. The software that ships with it is super duper easy to figure
out. Though it may be too simple as some of the control we would have liked
wasn't there.

That said, the gov't paperwork before we were able to fly it was a nightmare,
but operating it in remote, helicopter access only areas (no
humans/buildings/etc around for dozens and dozens of kilometres) did ease the
requirements a tiny bit.

Generating DSMs from the geo-ref'd images within an hour or two of flying a
flight plan was pretty awesome though. Being DSM (Rather than DTM/DEM) is kind
of annoying with tree-cover, but in less treed areas is still better than the
Government of Canada 30m DEM.

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senthilnayagam
volunteers with army of drones can can cover cities, there can be a
kickstarter for each city funded by its resident. I will fund for chennai and
bangalore for sure

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BHSPitMonkey
Prepare to have your expensive drone captured or destroyed by your government,
and to be investigated as a criminal.

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callmeed
This is so cool.

I'd really like to do a drone services startup focusing on municipal govt's
and agriculture. It seems like you could solve a lot of surveying/permitting
issues for cities. With ag, special cameras can give farms a lot of data (I
know this is being done already). I think becoming sort of the "Waste
Management for Drones" could make a lot of money.

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MPetitt
I was really bummed when I read that one of these costs about 12k. But then I
realized how much money you could make taking this around the country, mapping
out cities and licensing the images out. Heck, just taking private gigs for
colleges, estates, parks, and things of that sort could make you good money. I
think i found a new side business.

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bigiain
Check your local laws first.

I see lots of $5k+ multicopter/camera setups for sale at _big_ losses here in
Australia, when people obviously got all excited about starting their own
aerial photography business – then bumped into the legal reality of flying
these things commercially as opposed to being a hobbyist.

If you want to accept money for flying RC aircraft here, you almost need the
same qualifications as a commercial pilot _and_ a commercial airframe
mechanic. There are a few dozen companies who've got the required
qualifications, and they're _very_ protective of their turf. You _will_ get
"noticed", and the authorities (CASA here in .au) will come knocking.

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xgad
Wow, as a big multicopter and fixed wing enthusiast/hobbyist, I find this to
be super awesome. It also literally hit home for me because I noticed that it
was captured only a few miles away from where I grew up, haha. These
technologies look very promising for things like mapping agriculture and
providing recon in environmental disasters.

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616c
I live abroad and was considering pitching this as a low-cost alternative to
satellite imagery and crowd-sourcing with the the government GIS teams and
national computer research center ehre. Very, very cool to see it in action!

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riquito
Cool, but you can't let your drone fly over cities. Not in my country and I
suppose not in most places around the world.

My brother however will be happy to use his quadcopter to contribute with some
aerial images of fields

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Scene_Cast2
Does anyone know a free alternative to Pix4D (the image stitching software)?
I'd love to try this myself.

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ris
No. An OpenStreetMapper has come up with his own rather less sophisticated
pipeline for doing this sort of work:

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Balrog/Aerial_Imager...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Balrog/Aerial_Imagery/Rectification)

but it's a way off what this software seems to be able to do.

There's not much magic in what Pix4D does - the algorithms are generally well
documented (though tricky to get to work well from what I understand), it's
just no-one's done it yet.

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jfoster
This could end up being quite a significant threat to Google Maps.

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short_circut
Unless google maps either hires them or makes their own solution.

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jfoster
I don't mean that their solution will necessarily be better than Google's, but
it looks like it could produce top-down imagery that is about as good. Being
OpenStreetMap, it will likely be liberally licensed. With the data freely
available, the barriers to everyone creating Google Maps competitors will
suddenly be minimal. Currently those barriers are very significant (data
creation/licensing costs), so them being lowered so dramatically will be
unfortunate for Google.

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maxerickson
A significant amount of the data is freely available data produced by the U.S.
government(s). The issue is processing it into something nice.

The level of coverage that can be done with that data can sort of be inferred
from this post:

[https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-
satellite/](https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-satellite/)

(they basically processed landsat imagery to get large scale data for the
entire globe, and free imagery of the US gets quite a bit finer scale)

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pbowyer
n00b question: can anything be done about the mosaicing in the images (look at
the corrugated roof, the edge of the concrete etc)?

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davidsong
It's caused by the quick and dirty image scaling algorithm, it doesn't take
enough samples per pixel. We used to see this sort of stuff in computer games
before mipmaps were invented, which are smaller versions of the image pre-
scaled using a fancy algorithm and then used in place of the larger image when
it's smaller on the screen.

