What Does A $350K LiDAR Project REALLY Look Like? 

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.

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.

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.

@@AR-fh2uh 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.

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....

Good luck on your test!

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

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.

Reach and I’d be glad to answer any questions you may have: calendly.com/dylangorman-pb/20minfree

@@DylanGorman awesome, looking forward to it!

Thank you!

Thank you Mike!

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.

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!

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.

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!

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

I appreciate it thank you!

Not always, just depends on what your client is looking for/ what the deliverable requirements are. Thanks for watching!

He requires a professional 😂 . Expertise is not free.

Ok, i've rewatched the video and it's : Cardboard Keep it simple haha

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!

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.

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.

I haven’t yet but it could be something I add to the mix in the future!

I’ve been hands on with more than my fair share of LiDAR systems… When it comes to UAV baes LiDAR, Geocue all the way! Also don’t forget that you get what you pay for. Cheap Chinese IMU’s will burn you.

Only using it for flight, my data processing is using another GNSS head for accurate positioning

I used both. DRTK was for flight, reach was for processing

$350k is still high. Have done SoCal projects that were 1000 acres plus. $100k and made great profit.

L1 is not a great platform at all. I’d check out a comparison between that LiDAR and any other LiDAR system out there. There’s a reason why people pay more for LiDAR sensors.

You can but I did not

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.

D-RTK 2 was used for flight only. EMLID was on a tripod at a fixed location central to the capture

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

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 RU-vid 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!

If you saw in the video I broke it up into 12 different flight plans to keep VLOS

No, two different capture methods with two different results

@@DylanGorman sir can we use pix4d mapper for lidar image processing. I don't know because I have dji phantom 4 drone.

Roughly $100,000K as I have some other equipment not shown in the video.

Correct. Got a few words mixed up while speaking but I think the concept overall was delivered as intended.

Not attempting to pick a fight here, or pick sides, but... this is a perfect example of why surveyors may be painting themselves into a corner - or the surveyor's "union." Though surveying is highly technical and should be protected, it is something that can be and should be supplemented by those who are not licensed surveyors, assuming those providing data can show a proper, repeatable, and verifiable workflow, understanding of the inputs and output created, and why it works vs. being just a "button pusher" looking for automagic results that cannot be explained 😒 This was a big deal in the computer forensic field for years. There was much discussion about proper evidence collection and how only forensic scientists were capable of collecting evidence because their degrees covered many science topics, many of which were not necessary for the collection of forensic evidence. In the end, the forensic community came together and created several certifications for forensic evidence collectors that satisfied the requirements to ensure "clean", forensically sound data collection to ensure the proper forensic analysis phase. This must be the way forward within the surveying field because technology is at a point where data can be acquired correctly and accurately with less formal education and verified for use in projects. My mechanical engineering background is also evidence of the acceptance of this process. Though I have degrees in mechanical engineering and computer forensics, I did not pursue mechanical engineering to the point where I earned a professional engineer (PE) license. However, as a "mechanical designer" with education and experience in the field, I was permitted to design a lot. Still, my work had to be validated and "stamped" by a licensed engineer before it could be utilized in a project, and understandably so. Over time, it became a quick lookover because I had proven that my process was proper, repeatable, and followed mechanical engineering standards. @richardbullock9573 - I agree that standards and laws must be adhered to, especially in science-related matters. Still, I believe the surveying community must help itself by helping others, like my previous examples. I likely support your position, as I hold several licenses and certifications in forensic and engineering fields. I don't particularly appreciate when a person attempts to perform tasks that they only understand to a level of "being dangerous", and gives the entire community a black eye, but how do we collectively solve the issue because going back to school for 6yrs is not a realistic option for the majority of people out there. 😉 I would pay to sit for a certification that would license me to be a "surveying data collector". Be it a 2-year degree, a certification that takes 6 months, or a two-week boot camp, but something that would be comparable to the computer forensic example I provided. I believe NC is one of the more strict states and that other states permit levels of data collection that must be validated by a licensed surveyor, but are there any course recommendations or certifications that you could recommend that you professionally believe would provide enough education to a savvy LiDAR/Photogrammetry/engineering minded RPIC to be of assistance to a surveyor - outside NC of course 😂 Thank you for your insight