How Aerial Imagery Is ChangingOur View of the World

When natural disasters happen, it’s hard to grasp the extent of the devastation from the ground. When images surfaced from the 2017 hurricane season that damaged Texas and Florida, the most revealing shots were those taken from above. Aerial imagery captured by drones and other aircraft revealed the full story of the disaster on the ground.

Even amidst the great loss of life and home, disasters have a strange way of bringing about innovation. As humans faced tragedy, new ideaswere birthed from chaos. In areas of Florida and Texas, they put aerial drone images side by side of the region before the hurricane and after the damage was done. Emergency planners, residents, and business owners could compare what remained in place and what was completely gone.

Aerial drone imagery also offers solutions for business in far less stressful situations. From it, you can gather data which supports property-specific information about what’s happening on the ground. Aerial imaging can detect property changes, characteristics, assess liability risks, and even estimate damage.

Essentially, the technology can help assess trends over time. Images can improve our understanding of risk factors for residential or commercial properties and surrounding businesses. Aerial imagery can also offer critical information about the effects of traffic, weather, natural disasters, and more.

The main sources for high-resolution aerial imagery come from satellites, airplanes, drones, and mobile devices. While each has their own advantages and limitations, they all offer accurate and dependable data about a location when integrated. Data from all sources can be fed into information dashboards to create analytics for a range of uses.

Cameras and sensors mounted to low-flying aircraft often provide higher resolution aerial imaging than satellites up in space. Aerial platforms on planes make it possible to take oblique images because it can take pictures at 45-degree angles as well as orthogonal images. If you’re measuring square footage, roof slope, stories, and elevation heights, oblique shots are effective at providing information on new structures and other changes. They help create true 3D property models.

As soon as drone’s hit the market, their popularity exploded. The commercial aerial drone market has doubled nearly every year in the U.S. and companies are now using drones for surveillance, deliveries, and surveying crops. Some drones can be equipped with lighter or heavier cameras for more versatility and are relatively inexpensive.

Data and imagery from drones can also be used to create 3D models and take pictures of various terrain. When combined with software, the data and images can detect weather patterns and estimate damages to structures.

As innovations in the sky evolve and improve, we’ll continue to see advances in responses to disasters and inspecting property damage. Aerial imaging is the wave of the future and the future is looking up.

At Insitu, we develop commercial and military aerial drones and software to gather data from the sky. Contact us to learn more.

Could Drone Software Be Your Next Pilot?

Would you ever allow drone software to fly your plane? Even if the ticket was cheaper, over half of air travelers surveyed in 2017 declined.

While accidents in the air are generally rare, pilots are still human and occasional news stories headline about rants, fights, drunkenness, or pilot distraction. But drone solutions may change this. Drone control software installed on every plane would feature an experienced guidance system that’s always learning more.

Autopilot already controls anairplane for nearly the whole the flight. The software can handle the most distressing landings when visibility is minimal and pilots can’t tell where they are. It can create a map of its surroundings, including any obstacles, to keep the plane on the right track.

Drone solutions will soon log more flying hours than humans ever. When you combine the enormous amount of flight data and experience, drone control software applications are on their way to becoming the world’s most experienced pilots.

The World of Drones
Drones come in a range of styles from tiny quad-rotor copter toys to missile-firing winged planes. They can even be as large as a seven-ton aircraft that can fly 34 hours in the air.

When drones were initially introduced, they were flown remotely by humans which merely substituted a pilot on the ground. Newer, innovative droneas a service models don’t need pilots and can fly themselves based on human-defined routes. Universities, military agencies, and businesses are testing larger, smarter drones to operate without human pilots.

The Value of Pilot Experience
Becoming a pilot requires time and experience. To fly a small plane for personal or non-commercial use, you need to log 40 hours of flying instruction before getting your private pilot’s license. If you want to be a commercial pilot, you need to log at least 1,000 hours before serving as a co-pilot.

With drone software, every plane can have a pilot on board with as much or more experience. One software system used in many aircraft at once gains more flight time and experience each day than a human could accumulate in a year. Software pilots aren’t susceptible to fatigue, disorientation, distraction, or other human impairments which can lead to errors or cause problems in common situations.

There’s already some concern from aircraft regulators that human pilots are forgetting how to fly when taking over autopilot in an emergency. While humans may need a minute (or several) to figure out what went wrong, such as aircraft damage, a computer could assess the situation in seconds. This could buy enough time to navigate a safe landing.

In most cases when damage causes a plane to be uncontrollable, the result is a tragedy. An advanced automated system could make small changes to the plane’s steering and use its sensors to determine the effects of the movements. The software essentially learns how to fly all over again with a damaged plane.

Breaking the Psychological Barriers
The biggest barrier to fully automated flight isn’t technical, it’s psychological. People will generally put their lives in the hands in humans but not in computer systems. This thinking may shift as people begin to understand drone software has more flight experience and capabilities than any human pilot.

At Insitu, we develop drone as a service options for military and commercial use. To learn more about our innovative drone solutions, contact us today.