I’m a transmission line engineer and know how important accurate LiDAR data is along utility corridors. We use the surveys on a daily basis. I’m considering starting my own drone LiDAR services company so this is really informational, thanks for putting these vids out. Looks like you work out of your RV? What are some of the challenges you face with licensing, FAA, permits etc?
I sold my house and bought an RV and hoping to move into this by December. After a while it just becomes life. lol Hope you are well my friend. Good luck with your drone company. I think you should do it! Most will FAA permissions you should need will hopefully be all automated soon. They are working on it now. As is you are suppose to apply for the waver 90 days in advance but for now I will just be focusing on land outside of those major areas. I a based in a rural area and so that's my people anyhow. I am excited to travel to job sites and live there while I work. :P
You can also go to Ukraine to Kiev University and look into their drone lidar/magnetic systems they are using to locate landmines and grenades in the farm fields. I think that tech is going to explode if you can start using drones to scan the desert as a "flying gold detector". Are you interested in gold mines, landmines, or working for the military?
@@bonks4395 wow!! Never thought about that kind of stuff. I know drones with IR cameras are extremely helpful in Search and Rescue. I never thought about it for post war. Combo of LiDAR and thermal would probably be a fantastic combo for seeing mines and/or other threats.
Hi, Dylan. I scrolled through the comments in search of info on how you priced the job. I found that in fact the entire surveying job was $350K. But no info on how you priced the job. Pricing is always an important part of business and I'm sure others would like to know the actual way and amounts you price jobs. Thank you.
@@jonharis I saw the title and came for the same thing. I do this for work, although we specialize in the most difficult and extreme environments (inside industrial facilities, mines, caves, anything enclosed, the smaller the better), but we have done surface scans before alongside enclosed spaces for jobs, the largest being 10x this size, and we didn't even charge $350k for that entire job, so I would like to see where that number comes from. Is that the cost of having actual surveyors come out and do it by hand? Is that what he charged? Without doing a full quote, I can tell this would be a sub $100k job for us, including on site collection and processing, 2 weeks for completed deliverables (1 week on-site, 1 week processing). I guess my real question is where did he find someone willing to pay that much for this job, give me some of these clients willing to overpay! 😂
@URBN CTRL We deliver whatever a client wants, as long as they specify ahead of time so the data needed is collected, or it can be taken from the data we have collected (its amazing how many clients ask for things after the fact). If they want raw point clouds (usually subsampled to ease load on clients computer), meshes, topos, 2D/3D photogram maps or models, 3D printed models, convergence/divergence heat maps, etc. we give it to them along with their report.
A $350k project looks like 3,500km2 of 25points per metre2 with 10cm vertical accuracy fully classified into ground, buildings and vegetation. This would take 2 weeks (to capture) 6 weeks to process and deliver. 30 to 40 ppm2 over 750 acres should cost around $5k to $10k and should be delivered within 2 days.
I'm glad you seem to know some basic numbers but your valuation for the data is way off lol. This is why the industry is becoming cheaper every day because of undervaluations like this.
@@DylanGorman I have worked producing LiDAR for over 25 years and produce over 100km² of LiDAR per year so yes, my grasp of the numbers is ok.... I do not work with drones as they do not scale to more than just a few km² efficiently. There are also concerns with accurately matching data and creating survey grade information across large sites. Fixed wing aircraft running any of the higher spec RIEGL, LEICA or Optech Teledyne sensors can easily be productive and profitable at the numbers that I stated.
@@AlexRixon Well I am glad those numbers work for you. Fixed-wing operations and UAS-based ones both have their pros and cons so I am sure there is a difference.
I had a lot of the same questions. Would love to see the total breakdown of the cost. I’m guessing the $350k is the total cost for all surveyed products not just the drone work. I use the exact same workflow and products and know the aqusition portion would be less. I would love to learn more about your total price breakdown.
My collegue did bigger area, not with this expensive drone. But anway it was for wind turbines placement. 4 days of work. So I wonder what nutcase would pay 350k dollars for this.
Bro you are so lucky you got a really good price. Similar project in developing countries such as India, Brazil, or Indonesia will only give you USD 10k-15k for the same 750 acre area.
Incredible video. Watered my eyes. Very generous of you to do all of this, and hope it is bringing you a pile of customers and money. What a great project too. I am a developer and loved the project, loved your mapping, and learned a hell of a lot. Thank you.
I'm starting my first job scanning digital twins and this is what I want to do eventually. Thanks for demystifying some of the processes. I would love more info on how Rock Robo is involved with getting a business like this off the ground (no pun intended).
Nice ! But for 350k why didn't the client buy his own lidar system and hire his own surveyor to do the flights/processing ?:)) would have been cheaper for him to do that in my opinion, but good for you guys !
Congratulations Dylan, the video is well edited and clearly shows most of the steps of the workflow you explain. Something that is extremely important in such projects and we don't see here is the accuracy of the data you have collected. You have Control Points that we can't see compared to the lidar data. Also, we don't see the point density below the High Vegetation. The contours that you showed to be generated automatically with one click are one of the main final products in such projects and need to be further processed in a separate software. Regardless of the fact that the integration of such technologies (which drastically reduces the required time, people and resources) working on such a project and obtaining a highly accurate Digital Terrain Model is not such an easy task. Nevertheless, congratulations on the great job, keep up the good work. 🙂
I totally forgot to show the accuracy which was not my intention to deceive if people were wondering that. I do however have a previous video I filmed showed the accuracy with another contour/ LiDAR data set!
Just got a second 100% on the practice faa test for my p107, I want to get a third before I schedule, your vids are inspirational I hope to be doing rad shit like this as soon as I can build the skills.
I did this prep on my own, paid nothing. Lots of free tests out there. Took dozens, scored many 100%s. But when I took the real exam, there were several questions not on any of the 10s of tests I found on the internet. I still got 93%, but some of that had to do with me already have a pilot license and having lots of sailing experience, even over the Atlantic in a 33 foot sailboat with 2 other guys. Good luck on the real thing, suppose you already took it by now.
I'm new to all of this. But brother the best content and detail I have seen. Old School Marine looking to sharpen my pencil again and I just told my son that I have just went through a bit of college again in two videos. I've got it all in my head now. Because I logged it all in my daily book. haha. Man again, great content. Great detail. Great Job.
Hi Dylan, Great video! One question. Did you use a surveyed coordinates for each of your D-RTK2 base station setup? If not, how are the GCPs used to align your global point could dataset? Jeff Prober Prober Land Surveying
We did a topographical survey with 5 precise points and a satellite image. It did take around 3 weeks for 1000 acres. The costs as I remember were around 50k in 2005. And the resolution was sufficient for planning purposes. Lidar would have been nice later on for the golf-course planning.
So many people in here quick to judge and say they'd do it so much cheaper. Real Estate Agent and broker take their 6% cut no matter if it's a $200k property or $25M property. Only real difference is they put a little prettier bow and maybe use a special pen on the $25M deal. Why are you not going to try and get part of that pie? When there's that kind of $$$ involved, they have $$$ to spend. Get paid.
Thanks so much for putting this info out. Really appreciate you sharing. I'm just starting some basic photogrammetry but looking to move forward into LiDAR and surveying as budget permits. Thank you.
A question I see more and more lately is: do I need to be a surveyor first and drone pilot second, or can I learn this as a drone pilot? What do you think?
So, What is the lidar service portion from that 350k?? I believe 350K is what Service requestor paid to Survey company. Tbh majority of people who watch this video wants to know how much they can make being Lidar Drone Operator.
If he did it in one day, probably no more than 10K-15k lump sum. Surveyor's probably still had to use his data to do feature extraction, and to check it against their control.
“What does a $1000 car detail really look like?” (Only shows us him vacuuming the carpet) Sorry guys, I can’t tell you the rest that made this detail cost $1000 because the owner asked me not to…. See how that’s a bit deceptive?
I would love to hear the breakdown of the associated cost. $350,000 sounds like a ton of money but without understanding the cost that go into a project like this I have no idea maybe you only netted $350. Could you please give us a breakdown of the cost?
I'd like to know this as well. Seems like he just used some fuel for his car to drive around, some electricity for the batteries and his pc. And then a week or 2 editing? I'm a photographer and we always say we need 1 or 2 weeks to edit the photos, but in reality it's done within a few hours. It sounds like extremely easy $350k.
I am now worked for Highway project, combining Leica Pegasus MTLS and UAS Lidar (DJI L2).... the cost for survey of24km highway (100m corridor) is about 230k USD(8 weeks project)... also we use about 5 team of surveyors for GCP(250 of them!), Data QC, and traditional topo survey (underground utilities), 4 drought person to complete the job.... it amazes me u can complete such a job with few gcp, cheap lidar and getting paid 350k....😄 I think I need to migrate to other country🤣
Trying to learn more about the legalities on what a non-surveyor can offer, and to whom they can offer it. I know it varies state to state, but I am wodinring if there is a collective place someone has already gotten this infomration together.
Awesome presentation. I didn’t know lidar was able to penetrate vegetation to a certain degree. Learn something new every day. The contour map looked fantastic.
Recently stumbled upon your vids, and glad I did! You're a great informative host and it's easy to follow along with what you're saying and showing. Thanks for the content! It would have been awesome to just watch you work on this project. Kinda like a master just out there mastering.
Hi Dylan, I just saw this a few times over to understand every aspect of it and also to compare to what Ive been learning from surveyors. Im wondering whether the deliverable is enough to completely replace land surveying - for example - for a housing development project. Ive heard that when doing LIDAR in dense vegetation, its not quite enough and you STILL need ground survey methods to so survey grade work for precise jobs like construction. Would appreciate your insights into that. Thanks!!
Great video. Nice to see there is hope for the few of us who want to branch out from doing mundane real estate photos and video. Promise to save some work for us when we catch up. I love your humility about learning new things. You are very fortunate to play with such nice toys. Thank you for sharing.
Sweet video man! lidar is so cool and a huge advancement. One question unrelated to this specific video, when you did stuff like photogrammetry and 3d models did you have a surveying company come in and do GCPs? or were you able to deliver near accurate measurements of stockpiles without them?
Very impressive, Dylan. Seems a bit pricey..I wonder how the cost was distributed. The time factor for the final is quite short compared to the traditional way. I guess that contributed to the high cost.
with such budgets for the project, you can do wonderful things. In Europe, a maximum of 10% of this amount can be counted for such a project. And using the same equipment and the customer still complains that it is expensive.
Curious. Since you're not a registered surveyor, what kind of liability are you required to have? I.e. let's say you made some sort of critical mistake collecting all of the data at the start, the engineers created massive amounts of plans for development from your initial work? Would the engineers require some sort of liability from you? Or is it all on the registered surveyor you're working with? Might be a good idea to put in the time and money to become registered surveyor to secure your occupation? Seems survey and engineer companies already have what you provide in house nowadays.
As stated in the beginning of the video I was working with a survey crew that will be using my LiDAR data to supplement the rest of the data that was going to be captured on site.
Depends on the jurisdiction, where I’m at we are free to do any mapping and work that doesn’t involve boundary lines. Other states have controlled mapping as a licensed survivor only.
I'm coming to retirement from law enforcement after 20-plus years and have been flying drones for about a year and love it. I have done a little roof inspection and real-state video, but mapping is what I want to get into. I've been looking into the M30t from DJI. Would this be a good choice?
Good Video. I really would have liked to see the ground point cloud though. The whole point of your service was to deal with vegetation. Kind of odd that you just showed contours, and they were quite smooth for the area. Drone data contours are usually quite detailed, down to every rock. I write TIN surface software and know that "decimating" the point cloud also kills detail so curious on that. You also show the pt cloud as colored, so did regular photos at some point and must also have the photogrammetry point cloud. Cool stuff though. I'm sure you did not rip people off, ignore the overprice comments as obviously other products were involved.
Hey Dylan, @6:34, you show the tiles you broke up the flights into. Do you mind sharing how you chose those areas and what you used to calculate each flight? TIA
Awesome video, very informative, thank you for taking the time to share. I'm already doing topos with the M600, TrueView 410 and LP360 software but there are a lot more manual steps in between, very similar process thou. Looking to move on to something more efficient.
@@DylanGorman M600 is a monster, but I have not lost/crash it once in a coupled of years flying... yet. Do you trust your terrain following? How accurate is it? I'm so afraid the drone will crash because terrain wasn't properly measured.
Hey How many batteries did it took you to fly the terrian and what was the total time you took to fly the area ? I love your RUclips videos You should do a video of how many batteries you would need to fly a 700 acres or more and how long it would take as well. Also is it harmful to fly your drone more than 6 hours a day and how long I should fly before servicing my drone. This proposed video would be helpful to a lot of new drone businesses.
Ah it seems people do not really know much about business in the comments. We can see from their comments their mindset is if a typical local off the wall small business. Only concerned about price and position themselves as cheap or affordable. Creating a business whose positioning is all about price point is why they don’t get big clients. Big clients are concerned of the end result and return not really about the price of a service they need done. They know what they can pay. Anyone who’s had big clients understands that budget is least if their concern and which is why they always pay huge markups. Even hospitals don’t care about the markups in device/supplies they buy. They know they’re overspending. Making money is easier when you know the competition are never gonna actually compete. Love it. But also sad that the American smaller businesses have that really old boomer mentality and horrible boomer sales tactics Price/budget focused business marketing and positioning earns you price/budget focused clients who pay low dollar. Low dollar is great if you never want to expand. I’m sure there are contrarians who’ll lie and say otherwise.
People are calling it ridiculous because it is. I did this same work under a billion dollar company and at cost our flight price was a fraction of what hes claiming. Im skeptical he found someone willing to pay 350 thousand for a single flight, In reality, the entire project was probably 350k, between all the subcontractors, including the actual surveyors. He probably only made about 10, maybe 20k out of the 350k project.
@@자시엘 looking at one of his earlier comments in another thread I was about right. The deliverables included things much more complex like tree counts and water reports, so yeah the drone was a small but very cool part of a larger deliverable package deal
@@ye1451 I believe you. I’m just saying my point stands. Big investors and companies want the job done right. Price point is not priority. Obviously I’m not in this industry but this is across the board more so than othesr so maybe in this industry the decision makers are more focused on cost than the rest. Sooo many companies miss out on profitability because of the mentality that big payers are worried about the price. That isn’t reality(for the most part apparently)
As this technology advances and becomes more competitive the prices are dropping for projects like this! Of course, there are variables that effect project costs!
I was curious what was the pay for this type of project? I just bought myself a drone and I am an intern for civil engineering firm. Looking to get into unmanned aircraft with either vegetation Management or surveying. Thank you.
For stuff like this or your other photogrammetry projects, did you simply need to get a certain classification for your drone to fly over people sometimes? I have been doing drone photography for a little bit but just got my 107 and I am trying to really follow the rules with everything. Love all the videos. Thanks for all the help.
Yo I was like, that looks like wolf Laurel. Then you zoomed in on the map and confirmed it. Cool to think local people are getting drone services done.
You need to dump that 300 and grab you a fixed-wing. Total game changer. You could of flown that whole site on one battery and one mission. But the 300 is a solid drone. Keep it up making vids.
I wanted a high point density on the ground and flew about 180ft agl with terrain following. I could have flown 400ft agl with terrain following and completed this in half of the time. Fixed wing would have been difficult since I had a variation of ~1700ft in elevation change so that’s why I used the m300
Would it still not take forever to collect the data with the livox? At the very least you could rent a VUX LR or have someone else collect the data with one to minimize time in the air. We did two projects at 800 acres each with our VUX LR in the last month and only had 2-3 hours of air time. Just curious why you’re using such a limited range scanner, no hate, you guys do good work.
I was flying at 60m and wanted a high point density in my data, additionally there was a lot of line of sight issues which is why I had to fly 12 mission. Lots of ridges and valleys.
It isn't an "rtk receiver". It's an RTK base station that works in conjunction with the RTK tracker, both of which are GPS receivers, and use differential GPS to improve upon the coarsers GPS data from unencrypted GPS. Most of these go for thousands of dollars, which is a bit silly, since you can get the same by using two inexpensive gnss receivers and a bit of code using a gnss library to do differential GPS for the grand cost of about $100 and two RF-duinos.
Looks great! What kind of ground point density are you getting? 90m and 6m/s a sweet spot or that was the requirement to be able to achieve point density?
If I was at least 10 years younger and had the capital, this would be my dream business… 😜 This is a seriously cool video. I should probably search myself, but in case you have thoughts on setting up a less advanced system, that could be used more at a prosumer level, still with lidar but without all the bells and whistles… would you recommend any specific drone / lidar sensors / software for that?
Quick question - so is Lidar better in a sense that this is an actual sensor for meassuring distance thus creating points rather than the software guessing on the pictures? Thanks and awesome as usual - learnt a lot, want to start my own business in that field, currently trying to save for a drone :)
LiDAR allows us to get better surface data rather than the photogrammetry, in this case we can penetrate through the dense trees to generate a topo of the ground. Photogrammetry would have resulted with Poot results in the department.
@@DylanGorman Right - didn't look inside it and only lidar experience i have is with robo vaccums, but how accurate is it? It surely can'y scan trough a solid object ( lol ), but how deep can it go? I would think that a deep tree canopy would mess with the results. Do You do something in processing the get rid of such bad points? Thanks!
@@Shadoweee Lidar is using different spectrums of light. Obviously it can't penetrate everything, but it can penetrate a lot. Depending on your Lidar and the soil conditions, you can even get reading underground using a drone mounted lidar. Lidar can also penetrate most vegetation canopy's. You have to remember that light can pass through vegetation. But also, Lidar uses a very pinpoint beam of light and it is shooting out thousands of beams a second. Not to steal the thunder from Dylan, because his videos rock, but there is another RUclips channel called Indiana Drones where they go more in depth in drone mounted Lidar and it's capabilities including how far it can penetrate into the ground. Obviously though, an entry level Lidar isn't going to have the same capabilities as a $500,000 Lidar unit.
@@mikel9567 Oh that's really cool! I knew it was using a diffrent light spectrum but it didn't cross my silly mind that it has influence on passing objects - thanks a lot. I will check out the Indiana channel later today!
OK I had to write something here... I am a Drone Surveyor for few years now. Work in Africa as a contractor with my company for mining company. I do survey and Drone Survey. This 750 acre would have cost 14K$ to 20k$ but you charge it 350K $ ??? and you don't even do the survey by yourself and you deliver it in 2 weeks ? I would have done the survey by myself and deliver it in 3 or 4 days max.. Good for you to charge so much, but this is ridiculous.. Don't know how your clients even pay this price.. But I am glad for you, you push and you get it, so I guess maybe I should have done this as well ? Cheers,
its a click bait title. He stated in other comments that there was other services done that added up to that amount but that's not how it's stated in the title. Scummy if you ask me..... Just be honest
Not click bait at all. As mentioned in the video, the LiDAR was the supplementary data set for this project. The other services we provided were the deliverables for the project with the data processing, we even went back and did terrestrial LiDAR capture as well. Most of the data the client didn’t want to be shown on RUclips hence why this was a very high level overview of what we did provide. Sure I charged a lot but if the client was willing to pay that wouldn’t you want to take a job like that?
@@DylanGorman LiDAR is something I want to pursue in the next year or two. Been droning maps for 4yrs, but moved out of Cali because,…. Well….. it is nowhere near the place I grew up in. Had to leave. As I am getting situated again and on to another stage in life, this type of work intrigues me. Kind of calls to me. Fingers crossed and I’ll be in touch again to pick your brain.
The RTK I was setting up in the video was only for Terrain following. I had another base station setup on a known point for the whole mission. It was an oversight when compiling the video together but overall the information is the same.
Yup, if it can be automatized it will be commodified. This process is basically data entry with a few extra steps. Anyone entering this industry now will experience a race to the bottom
This is what the internet is for. Practical teaching and sharing of knowledge. Absolute hero
I’m a transmission line engineer and know how important accurate LiDAR data is along utility corridors. We use the surveys on a daily basis. I’m considering starting my own drone LiDAR services company so this is really informational, thanks for putting these vids out. Looks like you work out of your RV? What are some of the challenges you face with licensing, FAA, permits etc?
I sold my house and bought an RV and hoping to move into this by December. After a while it just becomes life. lol Hope you are well my friend. Good luck with your drone company. I think you should do it! Most will FAA permissions you should need will hopefully be all automated soon. They are working on it now. As is you are suppose to apply for the waver 90 days in advance but for now I will just be focusing on land outside of those major areas. I a based in a rural area and so that's my people anyhow. I am excited to travel to job sites and live there while I work. :P
@@ActionArtsDigital How do you go about finding jobs and knowing how much to quote them
@@ActionArtsDigital Sold your house... Lol. What passion can not make you do does not exist 🙂
You can also go to Ukraine to Kiev University and look into their drone lidar/magnetic systems they are using to locate landmines and grenades in the farm fields. I think that tech is going to explode if you can start using drones to scan the desert as a "flying gold detector". Are you interested in gold mines, landmines, or working for the military?
@@bonks4395 wow!! Never thought about that kind of stuff. I know drones with IR cameras are extremely helpful in Search and Rescue. I never thought about it for post war. Combo of LiDAR and thermal would probably be a fantastic combo for seeing mines and/or other threats.
Hi, Dylan. I scrolled through the comments in search of info on how you priced the job. I found that in fact the entire surveying job was $350K. But no info on how you priced the job. Pricing is always an important part of business and I'm sure others would like to know the actual way and amounts you price jobs. Thank you.
Agreed. I was looking for this info as well. It’s a great video but I would have liked to see a breakdown in cost.
@@jonharis I saw the title and came for the same thing. I do this for work, although we specialize in the most difficult and extreme environments (inside industrial facilities, mines, caves, anything enclosed, the smaller the better), but we have done surface scans before alongside enclosed spaces for jobs, the largest being 10x this size, and we didn't even charge $350k for that entire job, so I would like to see where that number comes from. Is that the cost of having actual surveyors come out and do it by hand? Is that what he charged? Without doing a full quote, I can tell this would be a sub $100k job for us, including on site collection and processing, 2 weeks for completed deliverables (1 week on-site, 1 week processing).
I guess my real question is where did he find someone willing to pay that much for this job, give me some of these clients willing to overpay! 😂
@@KlockworXMusic how much data are you delivering to the client alongside the map?
Man ,I was wondering too what is the market price set at for drone service
@URBN CTRL We deliver whatever a client wants, as long as they specify ahead of time so the data needed is collected, or it can be taken from the data we have collected (its amazing how many clients ask for things after the fact). If they want raw point clouds (usually subsampled to ease load on clients computer), meshes, topos, 2D/3D photogram maps or models, 3D printed models, convergence/divergence heat maps, etc. we give it to them along with their report.
A $350k project looks like 3,500km2 of 25points per metre2 with 10cm vertical accuracy fully classified into ground, buildings and vegetation. This would take 2 weeks (to capture) 6 weeks to process and deliver. 30 to 40 ppm2 over 750 acres should cost around $5k to $10k and should be delivered within 2 days.
I'm glad you seem to know some basic numbers but your valuation for the data is way off lol. This is why the industry is becoming cheaper every day because of undervaluations like this.
@@DylanGorman I have worked producing LiDAR for over 25 years and produce over 100km² of LiDAR per year so yes, my grasp of the numbers is ok.... I do not work with drones as they do not scale to more than just a few km² efficiently. There are also concerns with accurately matching data and creating survey grade information across large sites. Fixed wing aircraft running any of the higher spec RIEGL, LEICA or Optech Teledyne sensors can easily be productive and profitable at the numbers that I stated.
@@AlexRixon Well I am glad those numbers work for you. Fixed-wing operations and UAS-based ones both have their pros and cons so I am sure there is a difference.
I had a lot of the same questions. Would love to see the total breakdown of the cost. I’m guessing the $350k is the total cost for all surveyed products not just the drone work. I use the exact same workflow and products and know the aqusition portion would be less. I would love to learn more about your total price breakdown.
My collegue did bigger area, not with this expensive drone. But anway it was for wind turbines placement. 4 days of work. So I wonder what nutcase would pay 350k dollars for this.
Bro you are so lucky you got a really good price. Similar project in developing countries such as India, Brazil, or Indonesia will only give you USD 10k-15k for the same 750 acre area.
He is subcontractor, he gets part of that 350k..
yes 10-15k if the land is s flat and with no jungle. and maybe 1m contour interval. otherwise atleast 50k here in Nepal
Incredible video. Watered my eyes. Very generous of you to do all of this, and hope it is bringing you a pile of customers and money. What a great project too. I am a developer and loved the project, loved your mapping, and learned a hell of a lot. Thank you.
I'm starting my first job scanning digital twins and this is what I want to do eventually. Thanks for demystifying some of the processes. I would love more info on how Rock Robo is involved with getting a business like this off the ground (no pun intended).
Reach and I’d be glad to answer any questions you may have: calendly.com/dylangorman-pb/20minfree
@@DylanGorman awesome, looking forward to it!
Dylan you’re always droppin gems!! Thanks this kind of content that’s pushing the industry forward
Thank you for the kind words!
“Pushing the industry forward” by overcharging clients by 5x.
@@PrevailingFreedom Exactly!
@@PrevailingFreedom always those who love to race to the bottom....
Nice ! But for 350k why didn't the client buy his own lidar system and hire his own surveyor to do the flights/processing ?:)) would have been cheaper for him to do that in my opinion, but good for you guys !
He requires a professional 😂 . Expertise is not free.
Dude. This is honestly one of the coolest Lidar clips I have seen. Thanks for much for sharing this knowledge 💙
Congratulations Dylan, the video is well edited and clearly shows most of the steps of the workflow you explain.
Something that is extremely important in such projects and we don't see here is the accuracy of the data you have collected. You have Control Points that we can't see compared to the lidar data. Also, we don't see the point density below the High Vegetation. The contours that you showed to be generated automatically with one click are one of the main final products in such projects and need to be further processed in a separate software. Regardless of the fact that the integration of such technologies (which drastically reduces the required time, people and resources) working on such a project and obtaining a highly accurate Digital Terrain Model is not such an easy task.
Nevertheless, congratulations on the great job, keep up the good work. 🙂
I totally forgot to show the accuracy which was not my intention to deceive if people were wondering that. I do however have a previous video I filmed showed the accuracy with another contour/ LiDAR data set!
Just got a second 100% on the practice faa test for my p107, I want to get a third before I schedule, your vids are inspirational I hope to be doing rad shit like this as soon as I can build the skills.
Lol
I did this prep on my own, paid nothing. Lots of free tests out there. Took dozens, scored many 100%s. But when I took the real exam, there were several questions not on any of the 10s of tests I found on the internet. I still got 93%, but some of that had to do with me already have a pilot license and having lots of sailing experience, even over the Atlantic in a 33 foot sailboat with 2 other guys. Good luck on the real thing, suppose you already took it by now.
I'm new to all of this. But brother the best content and detail I have seen. Old School Marine looking to sharpen my pencil again and I just told my son that I have just went through a bit of college again in two videos. I've got it all in my head now. Because I logged it all in my daily book. haha. Man again, great content. Great detail. Great Job.
Hi Dylan,
Great video! One question. Did you use a surveyed coordinates for each of your D-RTK2 base station setup? If not, how are the GCPs used to align your global point could dataset?
Jeff Prober
Prober Land Surveying
Dylan's a 'must-watch' for anyone looking to get into commercial drones!
Thank you Mike!
Cool to have an inside look at such a large project, thanks for sharing :)
Thank you for uploading this. The only video on youtube to give an E2E idea of how lidar mapping works.
We did a topographical survey with 5 precise points and a satellite image.
It did take around 3 weeks for 1000 acres.
The costs as I remember were around 50k in 2005.
And the resolution was sufficient for planning purposes.
Lidar would have been nice later on for the golf-course planning.
Just, AWESOME. i work with lidar scans (pointcloud data) and you make it not only easy, But fun to do. THANKS keep it going. CJ
I really appreciate the video that you have done, it gives in-depth knowledge of the process and the equipment details
So many people in here quick to judge and say they'd do it so much cheaper. Real Estate Agent and broker take their 6% cut no matter if it's a $200k property or $25M property. Only real difference is they put a little prettier bow and maybe use a special pen on the $25M deal. Why are you not going to try and get part of that pie? When there's that kind of $$$ involved, they have $$$ to spend. Get paid.
Awesome video. Your most valuable skill is sales if you convinced someone to pay you $350k for this. Congrats 👏🏼
Thanks so much for putting this info out. Really appreciate you sharing. I'm just starting some basic photogrammetry but looking to move forward into LiDAR and surveying as budget permits. Thank you.
A question I see more and more lately is: do I need to be a surveyor first and drone pilot second, or can I learn this as a drone pilot? What do you think?
it amazes me how you can charge 350K and get 5 times what the whole equipment costs.... talking about fast ROI (or overcharging, I don't know)
So, What is the lidar service portion from that 350k?? I believe 350K is what Service requestor paid to Survey company. Tbh majority of people who watch this video wants to know how much they can make being Lidar Drone Operator.
If he did it in one day, probably no more than 10K-15k lump sum. Surveyor's probably still had to use his data to do feature extraction, and to check it against their control.
“What does a $1000 car detail really look like?”
(Only shows us him vacuuming the carpet)
Sorry guys, I can’t tell you the rest that made this detail cost $1000 because the owner asked me not to….
See how that’s a bit deceptive?
Quite the conclusion you got to lol
Awesome bro! Exciting to watch! Taking a break from studying for Part107. Great content!
Good luck on your test!
i can imagine the entire world will soon be mapped like this sooner or later
I would love to hear the breakdown of the associated cost. $350,000 sounds like a ton of money but without understanding the cost that go into a project like this I have no idea maybe you only netted $350. Could you please give us a breakdown of the cost?
For the same project, I will make 90% profit.
There is an extra zero.. 35k the recommended price.
350K is for traditional surveying with brushcutting.
I'd like to know this as well. Seems like he just used some fuel for his car to drive around, some electricity for the batteries and his pc. And then a week or 2 editing? I'm a photographer and we always say we need 1 or 2 weeks to edit the photos, but in reality it's done within a few hours. It sounds like extremely easy $350k.
I am now worked for Highway project, combining Leica Pegasus MTLS and UAS Lidar (DJI L2).... the cost for survey of24km highway (100m corridor) is about 230k USD(8 weeks project)... also we use about 5 team of surveyors for GCP(250 of them!), Data QC, and traditional topo survey (underground utilities), 4 drought person to complete the job.... it amazes me u can complete such a job with few gcp, cheap lidar and getting paid 350k....😄 I think I need to migrate to other country🤣
Trying to learn more about the legalities on what a non-surveyor can offer, and to whom they can offer it. I know it varies state to state, but I am wodinring if there is a collective place someone has already gotten this infomration together.
Awesome presentation. I didn’t know lidar was able to penetrate vegetation to a certain degree. Learn something new every day. The contour map looked fantastic.
Thank you!
Go into a forest, look up at the sun through the trees while walking. All those light rays around the leaves are what is similar to the LiDAR.
@@timd9430 That’s a good analogy. So it doesn’t penetrate the foliage, it just shoots laser through the holes.
@@VictoryAviation It can not penetrate anything. The same as light but just shoots laser through the empty spaces.
@@muhammadshahfaridullahkhan4252 The final result is that it can essentially penetrate the canopy. I understand that it’s still LOS.
Recently stumbled upon your vids, and glad I did! You're a great informative host and it's easy to follow along with what you're saying and showing. Thanks for the content! It would have been awesome to just watch you work on this project. Kinda like a master just out there mastering.
Hi Dylan, I just saw this a few times over to understand every aspect of it and also to compare to what Ive been learning from surveyors. Im wondering whether the deliverable is enough to completely replace land surveying - for example - for a housing development project. Ive heard that when doing LIDAR in dense vegetation, its not quite enough and you STILL need ground survey methods to so survey grade work for precise jobs like construction. Would appreciate your insights into that. Thanks!!
Great video. Nice to see there is hope for the few of us who want to branch out from doing mundane real estate photos and video. Promise to save some work for us when we catch up. I love your humility about learning new things. You are very fortunate to play with such nice toys. Thank you for sharing.
I appreciate it! I promise there is plenty of work out there!
Hey, im trying to start part time real estate capturing, any advices?
Schedule a call with me and I can give some advice calendly.com/dylangorman-pb/20minfree
Sweet video man! lidar is so cool and a huge advancement. One question unrelated to this specific video, when you did stuff like photogrammetry and 3d models did you have a surveying company come in and do GCPs? or were you able to deliver near accurate measurements of stockpiles without them?
Not always, just depends on what your client is looking for/ what the deliverable requirements are. Thanks for watching!
Very impressive, Dylan. Seems a bit pricey..I wonder how the cost was distributed. The time factor for the final is quite short compared to the traditional way. I guess that contributed to the high cost.
Did you compensate for the separation between the GPS and the rock scanner? And how are they synchronized? just GPS clock?
with such budgets for the project, you can do wonderful things. In Europe, a maximum of 10% of this amount can be counted for such a project. And using the same equipment and the customer still complains that it is expensive.
Curious. Since you're not a registered surveyor, what kind of liability are you required to have? I.e. let's say you made some sort of critical mistake collecting all of the data at the start, the engineers created massive amounts of plans for development from your initial work? Would the engineers require some sort of liability from you? Or is it all on the registered surveyor you're working with?
Might be a good idea to put in the time and money to become registered surveyor to secure your occupation? Seems survey and engineer companies already have what you provide in house nowadays.
As stated in the beginning of the video I was working with a survey crew that will be using my LiDAR data to supplement the rest of the data that was going to be captured on site.
@@DylanGorman Ok thanks, so they are taking all liability.
Depends on the jurisdiction, where I’m at we are free to do any mapping and work that doesn’t involve boundary lines. Other states have controlled mapping as a licensed survivor only.
@@DylanGorman so you made 350k?
I'm coming to retirement from law enforcement after 20-plus years and have been flying drones for about a year and love it. I have done a little roof inspection and real-state video, but mapping is what I want to get into. I've been looking into the M30t from DJI. Would this be a good choice?
That looks totally awesome, great that i found that channel
Good Video. I really would have liked to see the ground point cloud though. The whole point of your service was to deal with vegetation. Kind of odd that you just showed contours, and they were quite smooth for the area. Drone data contours are usually quite detailed, down to every rock. I write TIN surface software and know that "decimating" the point cloud also kills detail so curious on that. You also show the pt cloud as colored, so did regular photos at some point and must also have the photogrammetry point cloud. Cool stuff though. I'm sure you did not rip people off, ignore the overprice comments as obviously other products were involved.
$350k is still high. Have done SoCal projects that were 1000 acres plus. $100k and made great profit.
You didn’t show the data density under the vegetation. Do you not see the issue with that? Was any ground truthing done under the trees?
Hey Dylan, @6:34, you show the tiles you broke up the flights into. Do you mind sharing how you chose those areas and what you used to calculate each flight? TIA
Awesome video, very informative, thank you for taking the time to share. I'm already doing topos with the M600, TrueView 410 and LP360 software but there are a lot more manual steps in between, very similar process thou. Looking to move on to something more efficient.
Oh boy don't get me started with the M600 lol. It almost lost a reigl that we had been flying last year.
@@DylanGorman M600 is a monster, but I have not lost/crash it once in a coupled of years flying... yet. Do you trust your terrain following? How accurate is it? I'm so afraid the drone will crash because terrain wasn't properly measured.
Super well done, really impressive
Hey
How many batteries did it took you to fly the terrian and what was the total time you took to fly the area ?
I love your RUclips videos
You should do a video of how many batteries you would need to fly a 700 acres or more and how long it would take as well. Also is it harmful to fly your drone more than 6 hours a day and how long I should fly before servicing my drone. This proposed video would be helpful to a lot of new drone businesses.
I'm a civil engineer by profession, and transitioning into drone mapping and would love to know where to start
Hi! Want to learn all about mapping and how to use Lidar for this type of missions, where should i start?
Kind regards
Such a cool business. Thanks for sharing some unique insights
Ah it seems people do not really know much about business in the comments. We can see from their comments their mindset is if a typical local off the wall small business.
Only concerned about price and position themselves as cheap or affordable.
Creating a business whose positioning is all about price point is why they don’t get big clients.
Big clients are concerned of the end result and return not really about the price of a service they need done.
They know what they can pay.
Anyone who’s had big clients understands that budget is least if their concern and which is why they always pay huge markups.
Even hospitals don’t care about the markups in device/supplies they buy.
They know they’re overspending.
Making money is easier when you know the competition are never gonna actually compete. Love it.
But also sad that the American smaller businesses have that really old boomer mentality and horrible boomer sales tactics
Price/budget focused business marketing and positioning earns you price/budget focused clients who pay low dollar.
Low dollar is great if you never want to expand.
I’m sure there are contrarians who’ll lie and say otherwise.
People are calling it ridiculous because it is. I did this same work under a billion dollar company and at cost our flight price was a fraction of what hes claiming. Im skeptical he found someone willing to pay 350 thousand for a single flight, In reality, the entire project was probably 350k, between all the subcontractors, including the actual surveyors. He probably only made about 10, maybe 20k out of the 350k project.
@@ye1451
Sure
@@자시엘 looking at one of his earlier comments in another thread I was about right. The deliverables included things much more complex like tree counts and water reports, so yeah the drone was a small but very cool part of a larger deliverable package deal
@@ye1451 I believe you. I’m just saying my point stands.
Big investors and companies want the job done right. Price point is not priority.
Obviously I’m not in this industry but this is across the board more so than othesr so maybe in this industry the decision makers are more focused on cost than the rest.
Sooo many companies miss out on profitability because of the mentality that big payers are worried about the price.
That isn’t reality(for the most part apparently)
@@자시엘 true, always best to oversell yourself and hope for the best
I am I am an avid recreational flyer working on my part 107. Do you have any recommendations of how to get into the commercial drone operator world?
As this technology advances and becomes more competitive the prices are dropping for projects like this! Of course, there are variables that effect project costs!
I was curious what was the pay for this type of project? I just bought myself a drone and I am an intern for civil engineering firm. Looking to get into unmanned aircraft with either vegetation Management or surveying.
Thank you.
For stuff like this or your other photogrammetry projects, did you simply need to get a certain classification for your drone to fly over people sometimes? I have been doing drone photography for a little bit but just got my 107 and I am trying to really follow the rules with everything.
Love all the videos. Thanks for all the help.
The 350K $ price is literrally the price on the terrain, it's a completly crazy price.
Not even close, sale price for the land is about $25m as it comes with an airport, ski resort and 2 residential developments.
Agree that is an insane price
@@DylanGorman literally NOBODY believes you m0ron!
Extremely awesome, literally rocks lol.
Curious, how much of that price tag went to surveying the property boundary marks.
about 1/6th. We processed some other data as well that wasn't shown in the video due to client now wanting it to be shown.
Looks great I want to start a drone business locally. What is the best way to get customers?
Yo I was like, that looks like wolf Laurel. Then you zoomed in on the map and confirmed it. Cool to think local people are getting drone services done.
Next step to value add might be to produce a 3D print of the property perhaps 1 metre squared?
This sounds like a very interesting business. May I ask how you advertise or get your clients and jobs ?
newb question: how do you choose the boundaries of each of those 12 flight plans?
I am so interested in this type of survey now
Interesting video. Can I ask about how much all that equipment is worth?
So cool! I just found your channel and subscribed! I am in Utah looking to get into this industry. Awesome content thanks!
Are there courses available for learning drone surveying, or is it "teach yourself"?
Could you decrease the amount of time needed to survey the area by using more drones, though it would be more expensive?
Great video Dylan !
Thanx for creating such good content !
I wanted to ask you, how did you made that GCP template for paint spray ?
Ok, i've rewatched the video and it's : Cardboard
Keep it simple haha
You need to dump that 300 and grab you a fixed-wing. Total game changer. You could of flown that whole site on one battery and one mission. But the 300 is a solid drone. Keep it up making vids.
I wanted a high point density on the ground and flew about 180ft agl with terrain following. I could have flown 400ft agl with terrain following and completed this in half of the time. Fixed wing would have been difficult since I had a variation of ~1700ft in elevation change so that’s why I used the m300
Would it still not take forever to collect the data with the livox? At the very least you could rent a VUX LR or have someone else collect the data with one to minimize time in the air. We did two projects at 800 acres each with our VUX LR in the last month and only had 2-3 hours of air time. Just curious why you’re using such a limited range scanner, no hate, you guys do good work.
I was flying at 60m and wanted a high point density in my data, additionally there was a lot of line of sight issues which is why I had to fly 12 mission. Lots of ridges and valleys.
Youd think with all that lidar data you could've gotten that title text to cast shadows better :P great video
Where are you create a mision plan please, which softwere?
This is cutting edge stuff. Impressive
First time I see your video and I love it that a follow keep doing such a great video 👍
I appreciate it thank you!
I'm new to your channel, I'd love to know how you started in this industry. Ty in advance! 🎉
It isn't an "rtk receiver". It's an RTK base station that works in conjunction with the RTK tracker, both of which are GPS receivers, and use differential GPS to improve upon the coarsers GPS data from unencrypted GPS.
Most of these go for thousands of dollars, which is a bit silly, since you can get the same by using two inexpensive gnss receivers and a bit of code using a gnss library to do differential GPS for the grand cost of about $100 and two RF-duinos.
Correct. Got a few words mixed up while speaking but I think the concept overall was delivered as intended.
Looks great! What kind of ground point density are you getting? 90m and 6m/s a sweet spot or that was the requirement to be able to achieve point density?
How do I go from my cheap DJI mini SE, to what your doing ? I want to make 350K
How comes you switched from drone deploy or was Rock Robotic used as they were sponsor. This look super fun to do.
If I was at least 10 years younger and had the capital, this would be my dream business… 😜
This is a seriously cool video. I should probably search myself, but in case you have thoughts on setting up a less advanced system, that could be used more at a prosumer level, still with lidar but without all the bells and whistles… would you recommend any specific drone / lidar sensors / software for that?
Hi Dylan, super informative.
Quick question - so is Lidar better in a sense that this is an actual sensor for meassuring distance thus creating points rather than the software guessing on the pictures? Thanks and awesome as usual - learnt a lot, want to start my own business in that field, currently trying to save for a drone :)
LiDAR allows us to get better surface data rather than the photogrammetry, in this case we can penetrate through the dense trees to generate a topo of the ground. Photogrammetry would have resulted with Poot results in the department.
@@DylanGorman Right - didn't look inside it and only lidar experience i have is with robo vaccums, but how accurate is it? It surely can'y scan trough a solid object ( lol ), but how deep can it go? I would think that a deep tree canopy would mess with the results. Do You do something in processing the get rid of such bad points? Thanks!
There are some limitations to LiDAR as it’s not perfect, just another tool. The data is really accurate though, between 2-5cm
@@Shadoweee Lidar is using different spectrums of light. Obviously it can't penetrate everything, but it can penetrate a lot. Depending on your Lidar and the soil conditions, you can even get reading underground using a drone mounted lidar. Lidar can also penetrate most vegetation canopy's. You have to remember that light can pass through vegetation. But also, Lidar uses a very pinpoint beam of light and it is shooting out thousands of beams a second. Not to steal the thunder from Dylan, because his videos rock, but there is another RUclips channel called Indiana Drones where they go more in depth in drone mounted Lidar and it's capabilities including how far it can penetrate into the ground. Obviously though, an entry level Lidar isn't going to have the same capabilities as a $500,000 Lidar unit.
@@mikel9567 Oh that's really cool! I knew it was using a diffrent light spectrum but it didn't cross my silly mind that it has influence on passing objects - thanks a lot. I will check out the Indiana channel later today!
Amazing video. Greets from Chile.
thanks for sharing this is so useful
Small project! I can do this area with quality postprocessing for 35k$
$450 per acre for a lidar survery when you can ctually buy land for 500$ an acres in some places in the USA.
First video im watching from you and I thought you were Daniel Riccardo
OK I had to write something here... I am a Drone Surveyor for few years now. Work in Africa as a contractor with my company for mining company. I do survey and Drone Survey. This 750 acre would have cost 14K$ to 20k$ but you charge it 350K $ ??? and you don't even do the survey by yourself and you deliver it in 2 weeks ? I would have done the survey by myself and deliver it in 3 or 4 days max.. Good for you to charge so much, but this is ridiculous.. Don't know how your clients even pay this price.. But I am glad for you, you push and you get it, so I guess maybe I should have done this as well ? Cheers,
its a click bait title. He stated in other comments that there was other services done that added up to that amount but that's not how it's stated in the title.
Scummy if you ask me.....
Just be honest
@@mikea1972 yeah agree.... Good way to have a bad reputation for your company.. specially when you read all the comments... not professional at all.
Not click bait at all. As mentioned in the video, the LiDAR was the supplementary data set for this project. The other services we provided were the deliverables for the project with the data processing, we even went back and did terrestrial LiDAR capture as well. Most of the data the client didn’t want to be shown on RUclips hence why this was a very high level overview of what we did provide. Sure I charged a lot but if the client was willing to pay that wouldn’t you want to take a job like that?
Good stuff, keep 'em comin' - VERY useful info thanks!
Thank you!
Outstanding video. Thank you.
I appreciate it!
@@DylanGorman LiDAR is something I want to pursue in the next year or two. Been droning maps for 4yrs, but moved out of Cali because,…. Well….. it is nowhere near the place I grew up in. Had to leave. As I am getting situated again and on to another stage in life, this type of work intrigues me. Kind of calls to me. Fingers crossed and I’ll be in touch again to pick your brain.
I offer free calls and consulting programs so feel free to reach out whenever!
Even at $350k Mexican pesos it is too much. But very informative video!
Hey how many GCPs do you recommend for such a size with RTK Station and this drone for photogrammetry and with P1 Camera?
350k seems absurdly expensive.
We had aereal imagery and ALS done for not even 1/10th of the price.
Hey man, you said you are using UCGS my question is QGC have this terrain option ?
Can a plane with LiDAR do this? Still fun videos and love to watch
Yes, yes it can.
Dylan-
How come you were not setting up your RTK-2 station on a known point? Doesn't this affect your accuracy?
The RTK I was setting up in the video was only for Terrain following. I had another base station setup on a known point for the whole mission. It was an oversight when compiling the video together but overall the information is the same.
@@DylanGorman OK got it thank you!
Did you use Emlid Caster?
Would it not be easier to automatically process the data with some code. Seems like something I could do in a couple hours.
Yup, if it can be automatized it will be commodified. This process is basically data entry with a few extra steps. Anyone entering this industry now will experience a race to the bottom
Is this how google maps make things 3d damn this is amazing.