Thousands of everyday drone pilots are creating a kind of “Google Street View”, seen from the sky. Spexi’s collaborative drone fleet has already mapped more than 20 thousand km2 in 200 cities in Canada and the USA. Anyone can “rent” their drone — and help create a new image of the world.
Em 1858, Gaspard-Félix Tournachonbetter known as “Nadar”, captured the first aerial photographs ever recorded with a camera attached to a hot air balloon, on the outskirts of Paris.
Since then, technologists have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of collect images of Earth a grande altitude.
In the First World War, military espionage transformed this technology from an artistic curiosity to a tool for use in the field. Currently, areas as diverse as urban planningrisk assessment in the insurance sector and response to catastrophes depend on detailed, high-resolution and often 3D images of our planet.
In emerging domains like autonomous robotics and augmented reality, creating a digital copy of the physical world is one of the most consequential infrastructure projects of this century, notes .
Although the most traditional aerial capture continues to rely on planes, satellites and, occasionally, even pigeons, the sector is now also turning to drones low cost.
Bill Lakeland, CEO and co-founder of , a Canadian drone imagery company, says the evolution of consumer drones over the past decade is transform the aerial image.
In a recent post on YouTube, Lakeland explains how low-cost drones are disrupting older, plane- and satellite-based methods.
“We are getting better data with microdrones than what we can achieve with a 2 million dollar cartography camera. The moment has arrived,” he says.
According to Spexi, as drones available on the market fly at low altitudecan produce images with 30 times greater resolution to that of satellites.
Drones are also more cost-efficient and require less time than planes. This means that they are quickly assuming a central role.
What sets Spexi apart is the fact of, instead of operating your own fleetwork with a rdecentralized enthusiast headquarters. Anyone with a drone You can download the company’s software to independently follow a previously defined flight route and capture, on demand, the necessary images.
According to Lakeland, each flight covers about 1 km2 in just over 60 minutes. A pilot can expect to earn around $100 per hour, with some managing to earn several hundred dollars a day.
So far, Spexi’s network, with more than 8,000 drone pilotshas already mapped more than 20 thousand km2 in more than 200 cities in Canada and the United States. With this data, Spexi wants build a kind of Google Street View from the sky.
It is worth remembering that the investment, never officially confirmed, attributed to Google for Street View exceeded billion dollarsin an operation that was based on data collection with car-mounted cameras.
Although it was a different type of information, Google’s purchase of Waze in 2013 gave it access to cartographic data collected collaboratively by the platform, free of charge, from 40 million users.
According to , the professionals in the forestry sectorare taking advantage of data collected by drones to help prevent rural fires: are using images from Spexi to train artificial intelligence models capable of alerting forest managers about areas of high fire risk.
Similarly, insurers are turning to Spexi for risk assessment, underwriting and claims processing. In augmented reality and robotics, data collected by drones can also be used to create 3D maps for visual positioning systems.
With this type of 3D training data, companies are also developing generative models of the world that help AI understand the physical world.
The rise of drone imaging does not yet mean the end of other approaches, and it is unclear to what extent the industry will be served by drones rather than other means; in effect, the race to dominate the satellite image market is also intensifying.
And after all the Tournachon artistic projectin the 19th century, was not so different from the current collection of images: attach a camera to a flying object and photograph the Earth. The main difference, however, is that these images went from simple curiosity to digital asset that powers the world modern.
