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John Dickow: [00:00:00] Hello. Welcome back to another episode of your drone questions answered. I'm John Dicko with the drone launch Academy here to find the answers to your drone questions. The ones. That you submit and today's question is a very specific one.

So actually I'm going to read out the entire question. It's a little long, but I think there's a lot of context there. That's important. So bear with me here. a client often builds near railway lines and must monitor them to ensure no movement of the tracks as a result of excavation or other construction activity.

They are currently using Trimble Total Station devices, stationary and robotic, and we're looking into whether appropriately fitted drones could be used for this purpose. Among their requirements are measurements to be accurate within millimeter levels. If the track shifts up or down or side by side by one to nine millimeters, they must halt construction until the issue is resolved.

in this person's experience, who's asking the question one or two centimeters is possible, but they're not too sure about millimeter level. So they would like us to comment. So today I have with me, Zachary Riddell. He is Southwest business development manager, also a certified mapping specialist [00:01:00] of UAV.

Zachary, thank you for joining me today. Hey,

Zachary Radel: thanks. Thanks for having me.

John Dickow: I appreciate you coming on for this one. This is a very specific one. So we brought on somebody with a specific experience. I'm going to give you a chance here to just talk about your experience, introduce yourself, uh, talk about what you do.

especially as it relates to this,

Zachary Radel: question. Okay. It's, it's a very good question. things keep getting more and more precise in our world and, For

Zachary Radel: this specific one for the railroad tracks, I mean, I understand if they move or they change. It's obviously a very important thing. And there's a lot of other things in the, in our environment that would be kind of needing this type of accuracy.

So I work for Cooper Aerial. I've worked there for almost 14 years. I'm a certified mapping scientist of UAVs. I do business development in the Southwest, in Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern California. Uh, Cooper Aerial is a national firm, and we've been in business since 66. we are celebrating our 57th year this year.

I was in the airplane doing aerial mapping for about 10 years. [00:02:00] And then survived a plane crash in June of 2011, and that led me to start my project manager, just starting to learn how to do project manager of aerial mapping jobs, and then also are the drone journey that started in 2011 with Jeff Cooper, who was the past president.

His father, bill Cooper, started the company in 1966. Jeff took over in 87. And then our newest and most current, owner is Phil Kovich and he took ownership in 2016. So to get to the answer of this question, I spoke to Jim Krum and Dennis Harmon, who are our registered, rls are are registered land surveyors.

from cooper aerial and jim has been in the business for a man He's been in the business for 45 years and dennis is probably about 20 And their answer to this question is drones cannot get two millimeter accuracy, you know, one to nine millimeters, unfortunately, as of right now, the technology we have the probably most, the most specific reason would [00:03:00] be not enough or not robust enough IMU.

A B. G. P. S. Airborne G. P. S. And then just the sensors that we currently have on board with most, you know, cost effective payloads under 100, 000 and just G. P. S. Itself, as stated in the question, 1 to 2 centimeters is the correct accuracy. And getting into that one to nine millimeters, I'm not really sure how they would actually get to achieve that other than putting sensors on the track themselves.

I mean like, very calibrated sensors to knowing where they are and then if anything moves one millimeter to one centimeter, I think that you could probably get that or constant monitoring of the tracks all the time. And being within that one to two centimeter tolerance with GPS, it's pretty amazing to even have that kind of level of accuracy

John Dickow: realistically.

Yeah, well, absolutely. And so kind of just recapping what you said, um, it seems [00:04:00] like, you know, at least when it comes to a drone, this wouldn't be possible, uh, to

Zachary Radel: get that. You're flying, you're in motion. you're up either if you're flying at 50 ft or 400 ft, which would be the max that you can fly under the FAA.

I don't see that possible and the resolution is not high enough and the airborne GPS on the drone itself are not powerful enough, to get to just photograph or even LiDAR. at low range to get that type of accuracy that what's necessary. It would be great and probably in the future that will be possible.

I would think, but as of right now, a rod with the GPS on the railroad track can only produce 2 centimeters. So Drone or air with a plane or a helicopter, you're looking probably on average about three to five centimeters vertical and five to ten centimeters horizontal on average. And then if you wanted to make that information a little bit higher accuracy.

You would run level loops on your [00:05:00] control data and that that would bring those centimeters down a little bit, but not to the degree that this person is looking

John Dickow: for. Yeah, absolutely. that's very specific in terms of a millimeter accuracy. And I can, I can understand what you're saying here with, when it comes to drones that, you have these other variables, which kind of would, you know, such as, like you said, stabilization itself, And being able to get the right distance, all of that just weren't just not there yet.

But what you mentioned though you mentioned sensors, very close. and I don't know if I'm repeating you exactly correctly here, but using sensors, but a lot of them, were you saying, or

Zachary Radel: you could use camera, you could use LIDAR, you could, I mean, I think those would be the two best measures.

I mean, for sure, the, the LIDAR or the camera, so you'd want to have a very high robust sensor, the chip for the imagery sensor, and then a really great lens. So, the better lens, the better sensor, the better gimbal, and then the better A B GPS, airborne GPS, or IMU is going to get you down further.[00:06:00]

But you're still in motion, so those things, there's too much movement, and those things are not robust enough, even at the low level. Maybe if you had large format equipment at 100 feet. You might be getting close, but that that's not, it's not possible. There's no drone that's small enough to do that right at the

John Dickow: moment.

So, okay. very much appreciate it. I actually really appreciate that answer. And, and with getting, uh, you know, a question this specific on our podcast, usually we're, we're used to answering a lot more broad questions. And so. It's great that we can get somebody like you onto the podcast and answer a question.

So specifically that, uh, that an audience member has asked. Yeah.

Zachary Radel: Thank you for reaching out and thanks for reaching out to Jim. I think via LinkedIn, which was amazing. And if anybody's checking, Jim has written a lot of books about land surveying specifically, and he's written a lot of books on the processes of flying drones and how to post process data.

So his name Jim Croom and he's on LinkedIn. If you haven't checked him out. Check him out. He's a great resource for a lot of people on the internet

John Dickow: right now. Perfect. No, I [00:07:00] really appreciate that. And, and, and speaking of, resources and that, you know, the Drone Launch Academy, we're, a community of, enthusiasts, we're, we're learners, we're here to be educated, about drones and how drones are used in all different types of industries.

and we get a lot of questions about mapping actually. I know you're, you're much more involved in the mapping world, even than the drone world, but do you have any advice for, anyone in our community who wants to get involved in this industry, who wants to learn more about it and perhaps start leveraging drones or, get to a place where they could.

Yeah. I mean,

Zachary Radel: Obviously, the first place to start is, is where, you know, where you guys are, let's get to your website and look at all this information. I think another thing that's really important is safety first, you know, when flying drones, always look for the safety, safest alternatives.

things may look different on Google earth. And then when you get in the field, they look a lot, you know, 50 acres on Google earth looks really small until you're, until you drive to the site and it's huge. Always plan everything that you can in the office and have it ready for when you get into the field.

What is the purpose of the mission? You know, [00:08:00] like finding out these smaller details. Or bigger details that can make your products come out a lot cleaner and a lot better for what you're offering and Follow your checklists. I mean you can't say it enough if you follow your checklist every single time not get complacent you're gonna be an ace pilot and you're gonna do a great job every time so Following safety checklists.

What's the purpose. And, uh, from the photographics from where I come from, you know, clean your sensors, clean your lenses, clean your LIDARs. I mean, always want to keep it clean because. If you go and collect and then you have fuzzy data, it's, you got to go back and do it again. So you always want to, you know, have a clean lens and a clean sensor.

Those are the things that I would say are important. And all of our mapping is guided by, ASPRS, which is the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. And that's where all the. Vertical and horizontal, tolerances for all the maps that we create that everybody, you know, works with [00:09:00] us in the professional community of engineering, architecture and construction, they know our stuff is is to that or better.

So, whatever the tolerance is, we're always trying to be about 20 to 30 percent better than the stated metrics that we have to deal with. So that's that's what we do on a daily basis. And we have for the last 57 years.

John Dickow: I really appreciate that advice and that's, the perfect advice for, people within our community, the beginners, the people who are just starting out.

And so, to hear that coming from someone like you, thank you very much. We really appreciate that. and hopefully if we get more mapping questions, we'd love to have you back on here too. More

Zachary Radel: than happy to do that for you. Absolutely.

John Dickow: Well, thank you. Thank you Zachary for being on here.

really appreciate it. Hope to talk to you again soon. And Hey, you can submit your own questions and we will find the person to answer them. Submit your questions. Ydqa. io. we'll see them come in through there.

Or if you're part of the drone launch connect community, go ahead and type it in there. We'll see it. We'll find someone to answer it. So until then, we'll see in the sky.