Evaluating drones for aerial mapping

How often have we wanted to get a bird’s eye view with location intelligence from a certain height? A drone gives you the chance to view everything from an aerial point of view. So, how do you select the right drone for your mapping needs? If you are looking to outsource this service, how can a commercial drone service be incorporated into your business in the most efficient way?

Let’s understand the parameters that we need to focus on for selecting the right tool.

Selecting The Right Drone
1. Type of aircraft

This is the most important choice one has to make while selecting the best drones. There are many different classifications of drones. But if you have to choose an unmanned vehicle for a particular industry, it comes down to choosing between multi-rotor, fixed wing, and a single rotor.

A multi-rotor has a number of propellers attached. For instance, you can use tricopters, quadcopters, hexacopters and the likes. While the first two types are mainly small drones, the hexacopter is of a larger size. These are differentiated based on their range of travel in the air, payload capacity, and flight time. Besides, several applications and equipment like cameras, GPS, stabilizers can be added to these drones to boost their utility. These multi-rotor drones are more useful for infrastructure mapping and real estate assessments, which make use of aerial imaging, and aerial mapping applications.

Coming to single rotor UAV, these are known to be more efficient and productive than multi-rotors. They are a perfect option for you when you are trying to use large sensors. For instance, a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensor would work best on a single rotor drone.

Fixed wing drones are said to be the most efficient when it comes to covering many miles per flight in a short period. This is why this kind of a drone has found a lot of importance in military and intelligence. It can take up a payload of 56 kg or 125 pounds, which prove to be quite useful for using big IR cameras. It also has the highest flight time touching 500 hours on an average. More >>.

Source: geo-matching.com