Is LiDAR the next Gold? - Drone LiDAR

hey guys dylan gorman here welcome back to another youtube video i know i've done a lot of stuff about photogrammetry in the past but today we're going to be talking about lidar specifically this 50 000 setup right here as well as why lidar is becoming a gold mine in the drone industry so let's get right into this video [Music] so before we hop into the field let's quickly go over what lidar means where it came from and how it's being used today i think this will help create a basic understanding of what lidar is for those of you who have never heard of it before lidar deriving from light detection and ranging was first introduced in 1930s when they were trying to study the atmosphere with lights flashlights really it wasn't until 30 years later that lasers were first invented and they strapped lidar onto airplanes and started mapping topography it wasn't until the 80s when gps and imus became available that lidar data really became real and actually usable over time lidar has evolved from becoming this massive big piece of equipment that really only governments and private companies could afford because one not only did you have to put it on a massive airplane but you also had the funds for i mean these weren't simple you know 20 30 000 sensors these were multi-million dollar sensors that weighed thousands of pounds and really it was scientists and really really smart people that knew how to use it and really apply that data in real world use cases but nowadays lidar can be had for as simple as you know thirty forty thousand dollars put it on a drone and you know a 50 000 setup can get you very similar but probably more accurate data sets that was produced almost 40 years ago how ladder sensors really work is a combination of lasers that are consistently spinning at a high speed with a mirror inside spitting out thousands of pulses of light hence the term light detection and ranging combine that with gps and imu data the gps which we all know with gps is alongside with imu which tying the imu data with the gps and what the lasers are detecting creates your lidar data leveraging all three of these technologies together allows you to produce centimeter accurate models which for surveyors for mappers for architects for engineers this data is priceless for them i mean people pay tens of thousands if not millions of dollars to get this kind of data captured whether they're the ones capturing it themselves or they're outsourcing it to you know pilots like me that can go and capture that data in a fraction of time compared to sending out surveyors with total machines and you know all of the other tools that they have accessible to them we're able to do it faster with an ashes there because every situation is unique so lidar isn't applicable in every sense but it is becoming more widespread and more common for even just freelancers to go pick up a lidar job for a survey company and work closely with their survey company go and produce that kind of data as not everyone's an expertise in all these different kinds of tools so that's just a high level overview of what lidar is i can go way more in depth and kind of go into the bits and pieces nuts and bolts of it but i'm not the expert there i've just been really loving doing lidar capture as of recent and it's just become a hotter topic in my industry as the metaverse is approaching us and you know i've got a video right here that you can check out where drones really are being used in the metaverse in a big way and lidar is becoming one of those tool sets that is just skyrocketing right now so with all that being said let's go ahead and hop into the field and let me show you what it's like and really how to capture lidar data properly [Music] all right so now that we've gotten lidar 101 out of the way let's jump here into the field and i'm going to show you the entire process on how to capture lidar data now it's not as simple as just popping the drone up with a flight mission and capturing it and setting it off to the client now there's a few steps that you need to do beforehand and one of those sets is setting your ground control points or at least the visual markers on the ground control point one of the most important things about capturing a lot of our data is making sure that you can tie the lidar data to some kind of known point in the world so typically you'll work with a surveyor or unless you're a surveyor yourself for these control points all around the property or whatever you're capturing for what we're doing here this is actually an environmental study that we're doing that we're sending off to the army corps of engineers where they need to know where the water levels are in relationship to where the property is so that the development can happen and they can put dirt where they need to put it so since surveyors have already been out here what i'm going to go ahead and do is set these aerial tags on top of all of these ground control points the center point here on the aerial tag is going to go directly on top of that point these points are given to me in a csv file or in a cad file that will show me where all of these controls are essentially these aerial tags will allow us to see where these ground control points are in our data when we're processing it later on now where i got these i got these from amazon i'll throw a link down below they're pretty cheap but they help out a lot it's better than going and making your own or drawing spray paint on the ground because that can often shift this is a very accurate form of measuring the control points on the site so after you set the controls and the visual markers on the controls we want to go ahead and get the observation up and running you may be asking what is an observation well we're going to be using a gnss head specifically the mlid reach rs2 to capture an observation file while the drone is in flight essentially what that means is well the drone isn't necessarily having a triangulation between where it is in the sky versus the relationship on the ground and then the data points at its capture so in the in the ppk process the post-processing kinematic portion of the video that we'll show later we're going to take that observation file that's recording in real time continuously during the flight of the drone while it's capturing data we're going to tie all of those three points together to get our centimeter accurate data now my typical process is i like to let the gps head sit for about 15 minutes to get an average of its exact position and then i will carry on my automated flight so i'll go ahead and first get the gnss head set up i'll run through my configurations make sure all of the settings are all set and then i'll let that run for 15 minutes and in that 15 minutes it's already logging its position so now i set myself a 15 minute timer i'll go ahead and get the drone all set up which means i need to put the lidar on the gps on as well as the drtk ii unit for rtk flight for the m300 so let me just talk a little bit about the equipment that i'm using i just mentioned that i'm using the m300 rtk from dji main reason why i'm using that is well it has the rtk ability in it it allows me to get a more precise flight alongside with the ppk process which just helps the data get processed better additionally with the flight times i'm getting about a 35 minute flight time with the r2a and then as for the lidar sensor i'm using i'm using the r2a from rock robotic if you want to learn more about that sensor i highly recommend checking out harrison from indiana drones he's also the founder of rock robotic this is not a sponsored video i just love the product and love the team over there so so go and check out his channel right here as well as in the description below but as for the equipment that's really all i'm using i have the r2a the m300 drtk and the emulin reach rs2 for my gps head so by the time that i get all of that stuff set up my gnss head the mled reach rs2 should be finished averaging in that 15 minutes that i set i will then go ahead and plan out my flight route my flight plan on the m300 controller in dji pilot 2 it's super easy to do for all the flight parameters again i highly recommend checking out the links in the description harrison does a great job explaining on how to properly set up your flight mission so i'm just copying those exact same settings now as for the flight what you're going to do is you're going to turn the drone on let it sit for a bit collect some gps data as well as turn on the r2a i'm going to connect to it via its wi-fi signal that it puts out i'm going to connect on my phone for this web interface gui where i can go in and essentially start the r2a lidar sensor i'm going to see in there it's going to tell me it's basically going to prompt me on what i need to do so that i can have a successful flight after that's all configured i'm going to pop the drone up manually take it about 100 to 150 feet up in the air do two figure eights the two figure eights are very important that's essentially what calibrates the lidar sensor for your flight once that's done you can go ahead and start your mission and the general fly by itself once it's done it'll automatically return back land in its home point i like to let it sit for about 60 to 90 seconds once it lands and then i'll stop it and then i'll turn everything off main reason i like to do that is while you'll have two significant points in the data in the post-processing where you have the start and end point and those are very significant especially if you follow the process that i suggest here so with all that being said let's go ahead and jump in front of the computer and process some lidar data [Music] all right so now that we did the data capture out in the field with the r2a we're going to take the usb drive from the sensor itself we're going to throw it onto my laptop here i'm going to do a little bit of post processing so i'm going to take it into rock cloud's proprietary pc master essentially what that's going to allow me to do is one not only really align the lidar capture that i did to the base file that was captured with the rs2 but we're also going to colorize the lidar data as well so simply we're just going to take this usb right here i'm going to plop it into my computer do the post processing and then i'm going to take you into the rock cloud which essentially that's we're going to take the ppk version of the lidar data that's the post-processing kinematic which is what happens after we combine that base file the observation file from the rs2 gnss head with the lidar data tying it to the right datum that we want it to be processed in we're then going to take that data put it into the rock cloud we're going to set up the coordinate reference system which is called the crs that's just essentially how it's going to translate what the r2a is looking at versus what is going to be displayed on the cloud here and then we're going to reproject it in the proper datums since i'm in florida i'm going to be using florida's datum specifically florida west which is where this data was captured it will also allow me to send this data over to the engineers specifically the army corps of engineers that actually is going to be looking at this data set to do a bunch of determinations and some other stuff that i don't really know what they do but also the other stuff that they've captured and done studies on in this area uses the exact same florida west datum so it'll just be super easy to really look at this file in whatever they're trying to look at it'll just plop right into any other cad software any other cloud viewer that they've used and be able to analyze and process this data how are they how are they pleased and you'll see all of these green points these are the control points from what i had captured and after i get them on here i'm going to do what's called an alignment uh it's really easy to do on the rock cloud harrison and his team made it extremely easy to really manipulate and analyze and just do whatever you want with the data in the cloud as opposed to using a heavy lift your client based software to process lidar data into so essentially what they really want to look at was the contours in this heavily vegetated area here right at the back so what's great about this is all i have to do is go to these layers here i'm going to make sure i have my contours checked here and i'm going to click on high and what's going to happen is the entire everything from the surface and up is going to get stripped out so it's only going to show me the ground so you can see just a little bit of the data here the the point cloud that we're looking at as well as the contour files now these are set at half foot that's what they specified that they wanted to look at because they're doing a study on where water levels are at high tide in these heavily vegetated areas since it is really hard to get into those heavily vegetated areas without having to cut stuff out or really just brute force your way through there to look at what's going on this allows you to look at the entire area all in one view as opposed to just looking at photos which you can't really tell you know where that photo was taken sure it shows a gps coordinate but looking at it on here being able to put it into a cat software the possibilities are endless and people are capturing tens of thousands of acres of data every single day to do just this and so again it's it's great all you have to really do see if i just want to show everything on the surface level here i'm looking at the surface now and we can get a top-down view right here of this vegetation and if i just zoom in you know slowly zoom in if i can you know i'm in the trees here but i am cutting straight through looking at the contours here with ease i don't have to get sweaty get dirty get bitten by snakes and spiders and whatever's living in there because in florida there's some crazy stuff in there but this this application is just used everywhere and this is why i'm saying this is this is going to be gold in the aerial data mapping industry as photogrammetry is only going to get you so much and just to show you what i'm talking about i also did a photogrammetry scan here just to show a comparison i use the p1 camera so it's a 45 megapixel sensor i have made a video about in the past you can check it out right here you know it's it's just so limited i can simulate looking at a point cloud which this is what i'm going to do right here i'm going to go into the model mode and i'm going to turn on the point cloud but this is just everything on the surface level here let me just re-toggle that because it likes to do some weird stuff but you know it it looks really close to what i did but it's it's really not that accurate and we can't see what's beneath that that vegetation level and what's really interesting here is there's actually two impact zones that they're really focusing on i actually went back out a later date recaptured two separate three acre zones and i was able to have fully processed lidar data in the same day i went shot at seven o'clock in the morning got all the data uploaded by noon and had finalized deliverables sent out by seven o'clock that same day seven o'clock at night from seven o'clock in the morning you can't beat that and there's no way that surveyors are going to be able to compete with something like that with traditional methods of capture hope you guys learned something lidar is just exploding it really is gonna be the next gold mine in the drone industry so if you like this video be sure to drop a like if you want to see more videos from me in the future be sure to subscribe and check out some of the other stuff that i have posted on here i've got stuff from photogrammetry to some drone reviews and everything else in between and i got some really exciting stuff that i've been working on so be sure to just be on the lookout i also haven't really talked about this but pilot bite is my drone resource and education website that i've been working on for the last year there's going to be a lot of new information a lot of new articles and even some courses going up on their teaching about photogrammetry about gcps and all kinds of stuff about the drone industry that not a lot of people are really talking about so if you guys want to check it out there's going to be a link down in the description below be sure to check it out there's not much on there yet but there's gonna be stuff coming soon so with that being said i will see you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Dylan Gorman

Views: 14,522

Keywords: aerial lidar, drone lidar, drone lidar mapping, uav lidar, lidar, pointcloud, 3d mapping, remote sensing, aerial survey, drone business 2022, drone lidar vs photogrammetry, phoenix lidar, rock robotic, rock r2a, phoenix lidar systems, lidar surveying, lidar mapping, lidar for drone, rock cloud, r2a, dji m300, aerial mapping, indiana drones, yellowscan, velodyne, aerial photogrammetry, laser scanning, land survey, land surveying, civil engineering, digital elevation model

Id: LfmNqS7QUFU

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 31 2022