Thursday, April 23, 2015

Notes on UAVs, LIDAR, etc.

Lidar measurement

  • Velodyne's: Lidar Puck
    • 8k price
  • Velodyne's: HDL-32E
    • includes Garmin 
  • Routescene http://www.routescene.com/products/product/routescene-lidarpod-technical-specifications/
    • contains Velodyne's 35k usd sensor inside. but also spits out reasonable data. 
    • if they used the puck it would be a good e2e solution.
    • not sure if this is correct since hdl-32E already has much of that.
  • Autonomoustuff
    • box with 
      • LIDAR sensor
      • Inertial Measurement Unit
      • Processing Unit
      • Battery
      • Post processing software
    • Product good, price too large.

UAVs

Fixed wing

Rotary

  • DJI, S1000+, http://store.dji.com/spreading-wings/s1000-plus
    • weighs around 4kg, liftoff weight 11kg. 
    • price - 2.5 - 4.5k USD.
  • http://www.xactsense.com/products/
    • this is a running system as it should be. 
    • could be expensive; the puck is 8000USD, comparable DJI is around 3-4k, then that all is put together - unclear what is producing, but it could be .las files that we need. so 2k more. Total - around 14k of price. Then add some margin.

Data

  • National lidar dataset
    • "Production of a conterminous US 1-meter dataset will begin in early 2015 and will increase in geographic coverage as new high-resolution data are acquired."
      • this should satisfy all O' interest.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Google maps/bing maps

It is hard to improve from simple areal photos. So what do you do? Well, you try to make some 3d picture of various indecency:
google here and bing here.


Not sure if they are using the LIDAR available in Redmond or maybe it is some form of 3d extrapolation from 2d images, but the crippling of images in both cases is quite annoying.