Difference between drone surveying and manual land surveying.
Surveying is a means of making relatively large-scale, accurate measurements of the Earth’s surfaces.
Land Survey involves the scientific process of measuring the dimensions of a particular area of the earth’s surface, including its horizontal distances, directions, angles, and elevations. Artificial structures, such as a road or building, may also be noted during a survey.
A Drone Survey refers to the use of a drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), to capture aerial data with downward-facing sensors, such as RGB or multispectral cameras, and LIDAR payloads.
What are the Differences?
DRONE SURVEYING
- Capturing topographic data with a drone is up to five times faster than with land-based methods and requires less manpower. With PPK geo-tagging, you also save time, as placing numerous GCPs is no longer necessary. You ultimately deliver your survey results faster and at a lower cost.
- Drone maps created using good quality drone equipment, careful flight planning, commercial grade GPS ground control points and commercial grade processing software can potentially be accurate to around 2-3cm horizontally and around 5-6cm vertically.
- Compared to other surveying methods, drone surveys can be completed in less time, as drones are able to cover large areas of land within a short period.
- Typically, drone surveys can produce high-quality photographs and video recordings in a couple of hours.
TRADITIONAL LAND SURVEYING
- While drones are agile and reliable, they can’t deal well with high winds. Drones are lightweight and small; high winds can blow them off course and make it impossible for them to get consistent readings. This is unlike traditional Land surveying equipment and instruments which are tethered to the ground.
- The brick-size batteries used by drones are heavy and can get used up quickly unlike total stations which have better battery capacity. Although “the newer the model, the stronger the battery” according to Our In-house GIS Analyst, Mr Boluwatife Williams.
- Traditional methods involve staff manually traversing a site to collect data points, whereas drones can collect this data with staff far away from potentially dangerous areas.
- Manual surveying methods are incredibly accurate, the accuracy of the drone surveying is only threatened if the pilot is a greenhorn.
