The Project: Conduct a test to compare a UAV mapping data set with a traditional land surveying data set to determine accuracy and viability of drone technology for mapping purposes.

Skills developed:
Scheduling - Job delegation - Quality Assurance - Quality Control - Documentation process - Organizational governance control - Minimum Viable Product

In the world of land surveying, accuracy is vitally important to the operation and efficacy of the services you may offer your client. Land survey data is court admissible, and its accuracy has real world safety ramifications. For engineers to effectively plan and design construction, they must have the accurate data reflecting the contours of the earth and position of known items such as utility lines, existing construction, and natural obstacles such as flora and bodies of water.

Extensive testing was going to be necessary to allow UAV technology to be used for deliverables that a land surveying company would sign off on. Given this, we determined a project that would be traditionally surveyed and was in a remote location for safety purposes. We negotiated using our existing land survey services to map a broken utility that needed a replacement, and I was to go out and map the location with our drone so that we would have a comparable dataset with which to ascertain the accuracy of geospatial data created using drone technology.

We were able to successfully carry out this test flight, mapping the entire area in which the traditional survey workflows had been used in. I then began analysis of the two datasets to determine accuracy. The results were very promising; Using known checkpoints to establish and anchor of the 3d model generated by the UAV data, we were able to hit horizontal and vertical accuracy requirements withing a 95% confidence interval when compared to the traditional land survey data. What was more interesting however, was the realization that with a quick flight over a job location, we would have an incredible wealth of information that we could re-visit and pull more data from if necessary. This would result in a vast decrease in overhead as you would not need to send a field crew back to a location if your UAV data had captured the area you needed more information on.

This project was closed and considered a rousing success by the team and upper management, and helped spur the advancement of the UAV program.