Transcription
What does a 350 thousand dollar lidar project really look like? Well, this 750-acre property up in the Blue Ridge Mountains is what we're going to be capturing today, so stay tuned throughout the video to learn more.
So, hey guys, Dylan Gorman here. Welcome back to another video. For those of you who don't know who I am, I've been a commercial pilot for over nine years, and recently I've been taking a deep dive into lidar. If you don't really know what lidar is, I suggest taking a look at one of my other videos. I take a little bit of a deeper dive into it, explain what lidar is, as well as how it's applicable in aerial data capture.
So, why am I capturing 750 acres of lidar? Well, the property owner wants a full topographical survey of the entire property, as there's some future pre-planned developments here. So, they need a full topographical map here. And for traditional methods of survey capture here, in order to do that, it's one, gonna cost a lot of money. Two, it's gonna take a tremendous amount of time. We're talking months of data capture, as this isn't super flat land like in Florida. We're up in the mountains here in North Carolina, so it's pretty treacherous terrain. We're talking about over a thousand feet of elevation gain, and it's also very dense. There's a thick forest here, there's a lot of vegetation. So, traditional methods of capture with survey instruments, well, it's just not fully feasible, and it's not going to be a full data set. There's going to be missing chunks, there's going to be areas where you just can't physically get in there. It's just super treacherous, as well as just carrying a ton of equipment. So, we're supplementing a lot of the data in with lidar data. And I am working with a local survey company here. They've already gone ahead and set the full boundaries of the property, so I'll be tying all the lidar data to that. But what's great about flying lidar on a drone? Well, there's no obstacles with the drone. It's just going to fly over everything, and it has great vegetation penetration, which means we can create very accurate topographical maps, as well as some of the other deliverables that we'll talk about later on in the video.
So, the best part about all of this is one, it's not going to take weeks. It's only going to take one day. And I'm going to show you how it's going to take one day to capture all 750 acres. And two, this data is gonna be able to get processed within two to three weeks rather than two to three months. So, with that being said, let's go ahead and take a look at some of the equipment as well as software that we're going to be using to help capture this data properly.
So, just a quick overview of the equipment. For the platform that we're going to be flying on, M300 from DJI, super trusty, tried and true, always use this thing. The Rock R2A from Rock Robotic. It's using a Livox lidar sensor, as well as a 24-megapixel Sony camera sensor as well to give us our colorized lidar data. We're using the Reach RS2 for our observation files. This is what's going to be recording the entire time for our PPK process later on in the video. Additionally, we're using UgCS rather than DroneDeploy Pilot 2 for our mission planning. Main reason why is UgCS has terrain following, which is exactly what I need, especially up here in the mountains. Where DJI Pilot 2, you're able to do it, except you have to do a process beforehand where you have to go and create a DEM. I don't want to do that. I just want to use UgCS to allow me to automatically follow the terrain, which is perfect for up here in the mountains rather than in flat regions in Florida. And then the last and most important piece of gear here is the DJI D-RTK 2. This is my RTK receiver for my drone. It allows me to get very precise flying throughout my missions. It's also pretty much required whenever you're doing terrain following.
So, one of the first things that you need to do before you even capture any data is set your visual markers on the ground control points, which here the surveyors put a nail here. This is the boundary survey that they did throughout the entire property. So, this is what I'm going to use to align my lidar data to what the surveyors already did, since I'm not a surveyor myself. So, as you can see, this is one of the GCPs visual markers that I set. And here's a few other ones that I set throughout the property. It's a pretty easy process. [Music] I did paint because it's pretty windy throughout this property, so I didn't want any of the actual tags that you can stake into the ground to fly away because, well, they were going all over the place. And once this is done, we're going to jump onto the computer here. Now, I'm going to show you how to do all my pre-flight planning. We're going to be using Google Earth Pro to create all of my KMLs, which I'm going to use to import into UgCS. So, let's go check that out.
Thank you, Rock Robotic, for sponsoring this video. Without you guys, I wouldn't have been able to make this video. But for those of you who don't know who Rock Robotic is, not only do they sell the hardware, but they also have the software and the cloud capabilities to essentially scale your lidar program through the roof with their awesome support team, their awesome hardware, and their awesome products and services that they provide. You can quickly get up and running with a turnkey lidar solution compared to some of the others out in the industry. Rock Robotic makes that easy. Additionally, Rock Robotic is right around the corner from releasing SLAM, which is absolutely huge. It even works on their existing sensors, essentially enabling you to create digital twins without GPS data. You can walk around, capture the data with the R2A, and have it viewable in the cloud. Again, you can kind of see where I'm going. They make everything super easy, super straightforward. So, if you want to learn more about Rock Robotic and who they are as a company, some fantastic people over there, be sure to check the link down in the description to learn more.
So, as mentioned, we're going to hop on to the computer here, look at Google Earth Pro. But first of all, why am I using that rather than just doing the mission planning within UgCS? Well, I find it far easier to do that rather than trying to create all of your mission plans in UgCS. Additionally, I also like to use Google Earth Pro to do my location scouting before I even step foot on site. So, with that being said, let's go ahead and jump onto the desktop here and show how I create the KMLs, import them into UgCS, and ultimately create my flight missions. So, I'll see you on there.
All right, so hop in here on the desktop. I'm going to go ahead and open up Google Earth Pro, and we're going to go ahead and just take a look at the boundary of the property. So, this is where we're going to be flying the 750 acres. You can already see kind of the tiles of the different flight plans that I will be flying, which will be exporting those in KMLs. But ultimately, just taking a look here on the left-hand side, and I'm going to hide the flight plans here. Here's the entire property and the boundary, which is the red line. I got this from the property owner who bought the land about 20-plus years ago. So, if we just go ahead and take a look at the properties here and go to the measurements, we can see that it's almost 670 acres. Now, you may be asking, "Well, you said 750 acres." Well, due to the overlap of what's being captured from the lidar, I like to get at least a few percentage overlap of the actual property and a little bit outside of it, just to get a little bit more context of what's going on in the property.
I'm going to quickly show you how to set up a basic flight plan. So, the reason why I broke this up into 12 different missions rather than just throwing this entire outline right here as a KML into UgCS is, well, I wanted a little bit more finer control of where the drone is flying because obviously I'm going to lose connection if I'm right in the middle or at least I'm on one of the ends of the property, and there's absolutely no way that I can fly this on one battery. So, what I'm going to do is grab this polygon tool here and then just start clicking and creating my first boundary here, and then we can call this Flight 1. And the measurements is 72 acres here. So, we can go ahead and just hit OK. And then to export the KML, we're going to go ahead and right-click on it, save place as. I have this place called KMLs here, and by default, if you install Google Earth Pro, it's going to show as a KMZ. If you try to open it up in UgCS, it's just not going to work. So, make sure you change the save as type to KML, name it whatever you name it, and then hit save.
So, once I create all of my flight plans, this is essentially what I end up with. So, we're going to go ahead and open up UgCS, and we're going to create a new mission here or a new route. So, we're going to do import from file. We're going to go browse, and we'll just bring in Flight 1, the one that we created. We're going to select it, and it's important that you select "Lidar Area." Hit next, and I already made a custom profile for the R2A on the M300. So, go ahead, hit next, hit yes, and FOV degrees needs to be at 66. I want to fly this at 60 meters, and then I'm going to fly the flight speed at 6 meters a second. And then zooming in here, you can see it automatically created my flight route. And then to see that it's going to do terrain following, I'm going to do "Show Elevation," and you can see this uh see this chart right here. What the drone is going to be flying at versus what the elevation is of the ground beneath it is going to look like. So, we can go ahead and go into, you know, a different elevation profile here, and you can see that it's going to be following the ridges as so. And this specific flight is going to take about 24 minutes, which is perfect. So, I'll see you in the field to go and fly this property.
So, now that we're at our first location for we're going to be flying the drone with its automated mission, first thing I always do is get the D-RTK set up that way it's already connecting to satellites and when I power up the drone, it's ready to go. So, pull up the tripod here, get it set up in an open area. We're gonna make sure it's level as well. Then we're gonna get our D-RTK unit on. So, we're just gonna go ahead and hold this button for two seconds. Once it's powered on, we're gonna go ahead, put on the tripod here, make sure it's got pretty decent height. Lock this thing in place. Now, I'm going to go ahead and get the drone like so, get all the props folded out, get the drone on. Wait a few seconds. Then we're going to turn the light on. All right, lidar's on. And then what we're going to do is I'm going to go ahead, jump on to UgCS, which we had already went over. Then we're going to get the DJI Smart Controller connected via Wi-Fi, as well as our laptop connected to the same Wi-Fi network. And then it's as simple as just popping the drone up, flying, letting it do its thing, swap a battery if we have to swap a battery, and we're just going to repeat this thing at least another 11 more times. So, let's get flying. [Music]
So, now that we're finished with that flight, I'm gonna go ahead and jump on my phone, stop the recording of the lidar, and then we're just gonna pick this up, put it back in the truck, go to the next spot, and like I said, we're gonna repeat this another 11 more times. And then we're going to jump in front of the computer and process all of this data. I'm going to show you what that looks like, and then we're going to go into the processing. So, let's go check this out. Flying in action a little bit more, and we'll get to processing. All right, so now that we've returned back from the field, we're gonna go ahead and get the USB drive from the R2A as well as the observation file from the RS2, get it onto the computer so that we can do our basic processing for the PPK, and then we're going to import that onto the Rock Cloud, do some alignment, and I'm going to show you how awesome this data is.
So, looking here at the desktop, I'm going to go ahead and open up the folder. These are all of the files that gets created for every single mission that I flew. On the right-hand side here, I have the observation file. This 22.0 file is what we're going to be using to do our PPK alignment. So, I'm going to go ahead and open up this middle folder here, and we're going to run the PPK PC Master Project file. And as you can see in the bottom uh here, it is unpacking all the data that's in the folder. So, once it's finished unpacking all of the data files, which everything that's in the data files is all of the RGB from the photos that it's taken, the raw lidar data, all of the IMU information. Now, it's going to ask me for the observation file. So, we're going to go ahead and go to our base file here, and we're going to select our 22.0. We're going to hit open, and then it's going to convert. It's going to run some trajectory information. It's going to just ask me to confirm the uh GPS location of the RS2. So, I'm gonna have to do is just hit OK as so. Just gonna go ahead and hit OK. And then now this is going to start doing its trajectory, which is a very simple process. And then ultimately, once that is completed, this is what we are going to see here. So, I'm going to go ahead and remove both of these paths, and this is the raw flight that was captured, or at least captured by the drone. You can see its exact trajectory. So, as you can see, I had to do a battery swap in the middle of this flight. So, I'm going to do is I'm going to make two selections here. I'm going to start here. I'm going to right-click, start selection here, and then we can follow this entire path. We can see that the light green stops right here, so we'll finish that first selection. So, now that it finished the first selection, we're going to make a second one as so, and essentially it's going to repeat that same thing. I'm just going to put it in a green color. Once we're done, we're going to go ahead and click "Produce LAS," and then we can go ahead and upload that directly into the Rock Cloud. So, I'm going to go ahead and switch over to the Rock Cloud so we can take a look at some of the data that we processed, essentially merge everything together, and do some basic processing from there.
All right, so now that we're in the Rock Cloud, I went ahead and created a folder. I've already uploaded all the data, and I've already tied all of my ground control points uh to every single flight that I did. But we're gonna do go ahead and click this compare button here, and we're going to be able to see all of the point cloud data all uh presented in one view. And I've already done the basic alignment. It's very straightforward. So, right now, I'm just looking at uh just all of the raw data right now. So, if I were to go here and go into the RGB view, but we can see that my airport scan right here was uh this is just that scan of it. This is airport two, airport residence is right next to it. So, let's go ahead and take a look at what all of it looks like aligned all together. It's all in one gigantic view. I'm going to go ahead and switch over the material to RGBA, and here is the full visual colorized lidar data of the entire mountain here. So, as we can see, uh this is the main residential area here, the main development. This is the ski resort as well. You can already see some of the data that I'm going to showcase here very shortly. The airport all the way over here, and everything else in between. It's a very large property, but as you can see, there's a lot of areas in here that are just not very easy to get into. And what's great is, well, the lidar data just basically cuts straight through the vegetation. There are some limitations, I am aware of that. Let's go ahead and just take a look at some of the data sets here. Um, I went ahead and just did a smaller segment as just a test site, but this is a smaller segment of the entire property. So, I'm going to go ahead and turn on the contours, and my goodness, it stripped away everything and produced a contour map in a matter of seconds. Having this to send to a developer to maybe even redevelop the ski resort or add on a mountain biking trail to the mountain is done so easily with this without having to send somebody out there and document it. I mean, this just changes the game. And with how quickly we're able to capture this kind of data and produce a final deliverable for a client in weeks rather than months, it speaks volumes. And this is exactly why this is worth 350 thousand dollars, as I mean, it just, you see it. Ultimately, this has been one of the coolest projects that I've been able to work on in my nine-plus years of experience. I've learned a lot while doing this entire process. While mapping isn't new to me, leveraging different systems and different applications and even different, you know, flight platforms, it's really cool to see what's possible out there in terms of doing massive data capture like we did here. So, if you did enjoy the video, please be sure to give it a like. If you want to see more from me in the future, be sure to subscribe. And if you have any comments, questions, or concerns, just throw them down below. I'd love to have a discussion with you guys. And with that being said, I will see you guys in the next one. [Music]