Blogs

Small Drones accelerate and improve stockpile reporting for mines and earth work supervision.

Posted by Walter Volkmann on January 31, 2015 at 7:30am

Not only are they the safest, quickest method of quickly taking a snapshot of an entire highly dynamic site, they significantly reduce surveying costs. Adding powerful structure from motion (SfM) software and virtual survey tools to the equation means no boots on the ground and no need for interrupting any operations.

Tags: drone, method, mine, safest
E-mail me when people leave their comments –
Follow

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

  • Jimmy Oliver February 2, 2015 at 1:26pm

    email sent

  • Walter Volkmann February 2, 2015 at 12:31pm

    @Jimmy Oliver please contact Oliver  at oliver@unirove.com. He can give you more information.

  • Jimmy Oliver February 2, 2015 at 12:15pm

    What would be the best software recommendation for Volume Measurement (aggregates) at quarries, etc.? I am looking at Pix4D but it is wildly expensive. 

  • Paul Meier February 1, 2015 at 10:32am

    @ Dan

    Thank you very much for your time.

    Please so how (where) does the altitude reference coming from ? Or does PhotoScan use focus values to do altitude?

  • Dan Murray February 1, 2015 at 10:09am

    To be honest, Walters results look far better to me, but briefly:

    • Run a survey with UAV, collect georeferenced images
    • Process with PhotoScan
    • Export as GeoTIFF (I think that's what I did)
    • Import into GlobalMapper
    • Use volume tool to calculate volume

    The longest part of this process is going to be PhotoScan, depending on how big your area is. I have a dual Xeon server with GPUs and it still takes a couple of hours to do ~150 acres, but it will be significantly less if you have a smaller area.


    I haven't done anything scientific regarding oblique photography, but I can say that having a good amount of sidelap is very helpful. I haven't tried it, but you could probably increase accuracy by taking some photos from the ground, too.

  • Paul Meier February 1, 2015 at 7:00am

    @ Dan Murray

    would you be so kind and briefly explain how it works ?

    Or are you using LiDar and then extrapolating the volumes ?

    Thanks in advance

  • Walter Volkmann February 1, 2015 at 6:46am

    @Waladi, we did not investigate the effect of oblique photography on accuracy. Something still on the to do list.

  • Walter Volkmann February 1, 2015 at 12:43am

    I use GloablMapper as well but for the visualizations and virtual surveying we prefer to use Virtual Surveyor Tool, which is what we used in this video. GlobalMapper is OK for heads-up digitizing, Virtual Surveyor embeds you in a 3D environment in which you can visualize and measure simultaneously.

  • Dan Murray January 31, 2015 at 3:30pm

    I can't speak for Walter, but I did most of mine in GlobalMapper

  • Waladi January 31, 2015 at 3:16pm
    Is all features generated from single software processing such as Photoscan?
    And do you need obligue photos to increase stock pile calculation accuracy?

    Thanks.
    Waladi
This reply was deleted.