UPDATED 13:41 EDT / SEPTEMBER 27 2016

NEWS

DroneDeploy makes image uploads quicker so users in remote areas can work faster

Drones can go where people can’t, tirelessly doing repetitive, exact movements. As a result, a drone can be deployed into a situation where it might be dangerous or expensive to put a person, such as surveying land for a mining operation or examining the last stage of a building for a construction company.

That’s where DroneDeploy’s cloud software platform for drone mapping comes in. Today, the company announced an update to its service that would improve data portability challenges for remote areas with poor Internet connectivity. The update, named Turbo Uploader, provides much faster upload for users with slow Internet speeds to quicken processing times, while the same upgrade will improve how quickly users can load and view maps.

While many large-scale construction operations happen near urban centers, many of them happen in the proverbial middle of nowhere. Rural farms with lots of acreage would produce a great deal of data from a single drone run, but it would take a long time to get that data out for processing.

To put this in perspective, a 30-minute DJI Phantom 4 drone flight can cover 160 acres of land and capture nearly 1,000 images. This can total more than 4 GB of image data. Using a global average Internet connection speed of 6.3 Mbps, that would take approximately an hour and a half to upload—and most rural areas probably have far less upload speed than the average.

According to DroneDeploy, the new Turbo Uploader solution could compress that upload time down to 10 minutes. “The improvements in upload speed will make the imagery created much more valuable than we have ever had,” said Jim Love, a DroneDeploy beta tester and Herbicide Specialist at Beck’s Hybrids, a major U.S. independent seed company.

Turbo Uploader doesn’t just speed up data transfer, it lowers the amount of data needed, which is also a concern for overseas projects where data caps limit transfers or in extremely remote areas where pay-as-you-go satellite data plans may be required.

A topographical map of a valley near Zion National Park in Utah, USA, via the DroneDeploy website.

A topographical map of a valley near Zion National Park in Utah, USA, via the DroneDeploy website.

Key features

According to DroneDeploy, the big announcement is Turbo Uploader, which improves upload times for drone images up to 10 times, while slightly reducing image resolution.

Other improvements include an increase in map loading speed, so some low-speed users will see maps load four times faster. Finally, the update will deliver smaller export file sizes in the most common export formats. The change allows files to be four times smaller with no drop in resolution.

“We’re working with customers worldwide that are leveraging drone maps, such as farmers detecting crop damage and estimate yields, mining facilities monitoring excavation volumes, and oil and gas production companies monitoring environmental compliance,” said Mike Winn, chief executive and co-founder of DroneDeploy. “However, these are often remote locations that find scaling drone operations to be a major challenge given unreliable Internet speeds.”

The company expects to see a notable increase in the use of drones across the United States since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) updated its rules on commercial drones to open up to a multitude of programs late last month.

The FAA forecasts that there could be in excess of 600,000 commercial drones deployed during 2017 alone. With drones within easy reach for industrial use — by construction, mining, farming and safety outfits — the need for responsive drone mapping software and services will place DroneDeploy’s solution on the vanguard of this growing ecosystem.

In August, DroneDeploy raised $20 million in Series B funding, bringing the company’s total funding to $31 million.

Featured image credit: TomCollins Three Trees. The Palouse, Southeast Washington State. via photopin (license)

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