Good morning! Thank you for joining us for the NYSAPLS first Friday Webinar Series.

Today
we’re joined by Daniel Keth, who will be presenting a program on Drone Surveying: The
Complete Story. Before we get started I wanna go over a couple items to make sure you all
understand our webinar process. First, on the right side of your screen you should see a box we
call the dashboard. On the dashboard you’ll see a Raise your hand symbol with the picture of a
hand. If you can hear me, please click that button and raise your hand now. Wonderful. And
while we’re waiting for some hands to go up, I’d like to remind you that we cannot hear you.
Therefore, if you have a question, please use the questions box on the dashboard to ask your
questions and we’ll address them as needed or at the end of the presentation. Okay, I see many of
your hands up. Looks like we’re good to go. I’m gonna turn everything over to our speaker. It’s
my pleasure to introduce Mr. Daniel Keth. Good morning, Daniel!

Daniel: Good morning, Amber. Thank you so much for arranging this and thank you to the
NYSAPLS members for spending your Friday with me. So, as Amber mentioned, I’m will take
the group through, a little presentation about our best implementing drone surveying for
organizations like your own. Before I dive into that, a quick background about me and my team.
I’m one of the co-owners of the firm called Aerotas. We provide complete drone mapping
solutions for landowners. We work all over the country. The survey up and running with drone
survey operations. We have completed with our clients, we completed about 600 drone surveys
and in the neighborhood or 450 hours of field trainings and testings and RNDs. What I wanna
share with you all today is a lot of the best practices we’ve learned and the hard lessons we have
learned about how surveyers can benefit from drones in our organizations. Another word of
quick background: I myself I am a rancherer by background so what I will do my best to do is to
share with you the principle that I’ve learned from my clients. Forgive me if I invariably say
something that a survey might look like a. I ask for a little bit of forgiveness there in advance. if
you have questions, please do not be shy about sending those over. I’d be more than happy to
clarify and dig in what the questions. And if you have questions that are very specific to your
own organization and you want to have a conversation directly one on one, you can see that
down at the bottom of the slides there’s a phone number and e-mail address. So if you want to
straight shoot questions there that are specific to your organization, I’m happy to. Alright, with
that there are four main topics that I want to cover with you all this morning. We can go with
some tangents along this but the big things I want you all to be able to take away from this
morning. What are the key best practices and the lessons learned about how to build a
professional drone program for. The second is what the current status is of drone survey
technology. Taking this in terms of businesses or organizations – what’s the place you make an
investment? Next is some of the actual field and office workflow for using a drone as a survey
tool. I mean, I’m actually going to walk you through a quick example of some of that – the
processing, getting to find a line work from a drone 3D model and then last are some bigger
picture implications for surveyors looking to use a drone to grown their survey operations.
Before diving into the nitty gritty and I think it’s really important to understand what you should
expect from this technology. The technology is still new that we frequently find people that have
really-really divergent expectations about how a drone can be benefiting them. Everything from
people who just expect it to be a nice working tool, to the people that expect the drone to do their
complete for them. And the truth is, well surprisingly which you should be expecting is
something new. So the key thing is that the key kind of metrics our checkboxes you should be
using. We’re evaluating either a drone program you currently have in place yourself or whether
you’re determining what it’s starting a drone program is a good investment for your team as
follows: First, probably most importantly, is the drone program should be getting you to your
final line-work. So what I mean by this is you should have as part of your drone program a
streamline in an efficient way to get you to the contours, break-lines, feature lines, I don’t know.
I’m gonna show you an example of the work we’ve identified as effectively but the important
should not just be getting you a pretty picture. If all you’re getting from your drone is a video or
some aerial imagery you’re leaving money on the table. You’re leaving some benefit on the
table. With that your total investment, a good benchmark to have is about $10,000. So you
should be respecting if you’re ramping up a drone operation your investment shouldn’t be more
than about $10,000 total. I’ll get in a little bit into what. Accuracy wise you should be expecting
a 0.1` vertical or better and that’s when tested to ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards so not
one of individual test shots, but actually the totally accuracy of your own error should be at about
a tenth of the or better. In terms of the actual benefits to you or your company, the big thing is
time savings. So you should be with the right operations, you should be saving 60% to 90% of
man hours in the field. So a project that would’ve taken a two-men crew a whole day should now
be taking one person in just a couple of hours in the field. Obviously, there are some variations
for some types of projects and some factors in the field, but it really should never be taking you,
or saving you less than half the time. And then your office time shouldn’t be that much different.
We hear a lot of horror stories about folks using drones saving much time in the field and then it
doubles, triples, quadruples the time in the office and so the game is pretty minimal. But the right
processing workflow in the office, your office time should be about a wash with what it is if
you’re doing the same project conventionally. The operation should be designed so that you
don’t need the highest specialized drone operator. You just have to go out and post job postings
for drone pilot or drone surveyor and it should be a tool that is a truck just like a GPS or a station
that most of your survey staff can still be using. Then also critically important is you should not
be introducing any additional risk to your people or to your business by using this tool. And that
comes with having the right insurance, having the right compliance strategy and most
importantly, having the right field operation. So this is kind of … I see this has mistakes. This is
what you should be… you should be demanding a lot of this technology and this is what it
should look like. So in terms of digging into the actual benefit to your organization, there are a
couple key things we see from our clients, as the main ways they’re benefiting from this tool in
their operation. The big banner headline, the most important benefit is time savings. That should
always be what you’re focused on first, that should be your top priority in implementing a drone
program. In what time savings should look like, I mentioned before about 60% to 90% time
saving in the field … in terms of the man-hours it takes to complete a survey. When you’re using
a drone, that total amount of time should drop to, or you should have a saving of 40% to 60%,
that includes field time and office time. So obviously, that means if you’re producing your
final… getting to your final… man-hours, that means your projects are faster, that means you
can bid them a bit lower and still profit even more substantially from them. It also means that
your people, your field crew, is gonna be doing a lot more work in the same amount of time.
Beyond that time saving you also have a handful of benefits as well. One I think it is preemption
– meaning that it’s really easy to collect more data than you necessarily need, Great quick
anecdote from one of our clients. He went out to do a project at a landowner site and the
landowner said: No, I just want you guys to survey the first half of this project, that’s about 10
acres total. So they just had 5 acres. And they check and double check and say: Are you sure?
We’re gonna be out there, are you sure you don’t want us to survey the back half of the property
as well? No, no, no, just the front half. They said: okay. They had a hunch. They worked with
this client before so they just took their drone up, they flew the entire property. They were
already out there it took an additional maybe 10 minutes to do. Go back to the office, they
produce the survey of half of the property, hand it over to the landowner. He says: Hey, this is
great. Can I actually get the back half of the property also? They had already collected that data
using the drone when they were in the field with marginal additional work in the field. They
already had that data in the office, all they had to do was pull it up and complete the survey. So
they executed that second survey with nearly 0 additional field work and marginal additional
office work. So it allows you to collect more than you need. With that, on a similar note, it’s easy
to collect this data, it functions effectively as a record that you maintain. So every time you use
the drone on a site you’re collecting this reach, accurate, 3D data, comprehensive 3D data of that
project site. Meaning you’re not just relying on what specific points your field crew collects in
the field, but if you come back to the office and realize that Oh, we actually needed to collect
some more data on the site, you can just pull out a 3D model and actually extract the survey
shots from that record. Never mind the fact that in the unfortunate incident of disputes with
clients or landowners, you have this record, this very high resolution image record of exactly
what the site looked like on the day you were there. That really high resolution imagery also
means that you can provide really high quality, high resolution base-maps behind your surveys
so create more valuable final deliver ball to your clients. And then of course, you have the
benefit of cost savings from aerial contractors if you want you can start doing more projects
yourself than having to shop them out to aerial. And then last and very importantly, a drone
allows you to reduce the amount of time your crew has to spend in dangerous situations.
Standing in roadways, you know that a surveyor has to stand and take shots in a busy roadway,
you can just fly a drone over the road or steeper slopes or other sorts of hazardous or difficult
access areas. You just fly over without having to walk through it. So these are the varied ways
you can expect a drone to be benefiting your business. Again, I really encourage you to focus
primarily on that time savings benefit and then all the rest of this. So what it actually takes to
capture these benefits is to think of a drone as part of a comprehensive drone program. So it’s not
just a matter of find a drone on Amazon or at your local distributor, throw it in the air and expect
magic to happen. You really do need to take a systematic approach to this. And what we have
found is the effective drone program, a professional drone program has five key components,
five key categories of things that you have to put in place. The first, obviously, the one that
everybody thinks about it’s the equipment itself. The drone, but also all the other gear you wanna
have in place in order to operate that drone effectively – spare batteries, controller with the auto-
pilot installed, and even the… we found that having the right kind of case can actually be really
important to have that thrown into the truck and not worry about damaging the drone. Yeah, the
equipment, you also have to be compliant. Anybody who is gonna fly the drone needs to have a
special drone pilot license, it needs to be very familiar with the rules so they make sure every
time they go out they’re using the drone in a way that is compliant with regulation. Third,
insurance. You gotta make sure that before you shouldn’t expose your business to any additional
risk. Most business liability insurance policies have aviation exclusion – they say that if it flies
it’s not covered so you need to get insurance that is going to plug back the aviation exclusion
gap. And then, the last two that folks seem to think about the least but also the most important.
First is having clear, well-defined filed operations or standard filed operation procedures and
training for your staff on those filed operations. And then last, is having a clear workflow in the
office for getting to your final line-work deliverable. Now, I’m gonna get up on my for just a
moment because we have the benefit of seeing the patterns in how the businesses, the struggles
they have in implementing drone programs. And we see a lot of folks running into very similar
problems. And this one really consistent theme you see in companies when they struggle with
this and not that they over emphasize the drone itself. Honestly, it’s a… but they just think about
that first bullet point, just their equipment. That’s what they put all their energy into, they go
shopping, they compare tax, they get completely sucked into that and they think that it’s all just
about getting the right turn. Honestly, at this point, the drone is the easy part. The drone is not
the part to focus your energy on. This technology has actually matured really-really quickly to
the point that you can have a very effective drone program with a pretty inexpensive easy to use
drone. The place where companies make money or lose money, the place where they are
effective or ineffective, that results in having an accurate efficient drone program or a wasteful
one comes out of these last two bullet points. It’s about having good, clear operating procedures
so that every time your crews go out, they are collecting the right data, they’re doing it
efficiently, they’re doing it in a way that’s repeatable and having really clear training on that.
This goes back to when I said you should not be needing a high specialized drone pilot for your
drone program, you should have a good training that allows anybody, any one of your crew field
members to be able to become a proficient drone operator. And then that last bullet point of the
liberal production – if you just have complete the field operation, the equipment, everything
dialed in but of what you get back is this overly complex 3D point – you don’t have an efficient
way to get to that final deliverable, you can’t use it if you’re busy, you can’t use the actual
surveys. It’s a marketing tool, but it’s not actually getting you to the value that it could. So this is
really what we are focused on – unsurprisingly, what my company provides is one solution that
encapsulates all five of those components. And honestly, most of our time and energy goes into
these strategy points. This is really where we’ve put a lot of focus on, on optimizing the force. So
thinking about, now that I’ve talked about how unimportant the drone is, we’re gonna talk about
the drone. A lot of folks wanna know what is the technology, where if I’m thinking about
purchasing a drone, what types of features should I be focused on. From our experience, having
done a ton of testing, having the opportunity to test pretty much everything under the sun at this
point, we keep coming back, and we’re continuing testing this stuff, we keep coming back to the
fact that right now the smart investment is actually on a pretty inexpensive camera drone. So I
can get into exactly the drone use in a moment, but I wanna talk about the three technologies that
people think about when they call us: Hey, should I buy a drone that has this feature? And so I
kind of wanna talk about each of those in a moment. And those are fixed-winged drones, so
airplane style as opposed to the helicopter style which is called the multiroader. Drones can light
our sensors or laser scanners and third is drones carrying the survey GPS, RGK or KPK or direct