Kole Wetland Canal Mapping with ClusterODM

My friends and collegues at International Center for Free and Open Source Software in Kerala, India have done a pretty interesting and massive mapping initiative over Thrissur Kole Wetlands. The wetlands are a massive 30,000+ acre area that are both important to wildlife and provide rice production. Suman Rajan, Asish Abraham, and Deepthi Patric (left to right in image below) mapped 9000 acres of it. … Continue reading Kole Wetland Canal Mapping with ClusterODM

Dar visit, drone fun

While I was in East Africa, I made a quick side trip to Dar to visit with some compatriots also interested in drones for good — specifically Frederick Mbuya of UhuruNet, UhuruFly, UhuruLabs, and World Bank Tanzania (etc.) , as well as Ivan Gayton, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Tanzania, Missing Maps, formerly MSF UK (etc).   We chatted about tech, development, drones for good, and played … Continue reading Dar visit, drone fun

Finding peace, finding ground: Drone flights for hydrologic modeling

Another problem is the difficulty of turning photogrammetrically derived point clouds into Digital Terrain Models. There is proprietary software that does this well (e.g. LasTools and others), but we sought a free and open source alternative and approach. Let’s visualize the problem. Continue reading Finding peace, finding ground: Drone flights for hydrologic modeling

OpenDroneMap — Paris Code Sprint

I failed to make it to the Paris Code Sprint. It just wasn’t in the cards. But, my colleague Dakota and I sprinted anyway, with some help and feedback from the OpenDroneMap community. So, what did we do? Dakota did most of the work. He hacked away at the cmake branch of ODM, a branch set up by Edgar Riba to substantially improve the installation … Continue reading OpenDroneMap — Paris Code Sprint

Airspace — A deep rabbit hole

In previous maps we looked at Class B, C, and D airspace. Let’s add in Class E0 and E5… (not yet in 3D): (Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data by OpenStreetMap, under ODbL) Previous posts: https://smathermather.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/airspace-is-complicated-and-so-i-abuse-postgis-once-again/ and https://smathermather.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/airspace-is-complicated-and-so-i-abuse-postgis-once-again-reprise/ Continue reading Airspace — A deep rabbit hole

Airspace is complicated — and so I abuse PostGIS once again — Reprise…

In the previous post: https://smathermather.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/airspace-is-complicated-and-so-i-abuse-postgis-once-again/ we explore the 3D shape and complexity of controlled airspace. Now here’s the rest of the code. We’ll add our affine transformation ala Seth Fitsimmons: And integrate that into our original function: And voila! Let’s take a look at Washington, DC and surrounds, another nice complicated example: And again with map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data … Continue reading Airspace is complicated — and so I abuse PostGIS once again — Reprise…

Airspace is complicated — and so I abuse PostGIS once again

Let’s ignore for a moment the drone hobbiest / enthusiast. What is the shape of airspace for airplanes and commercial and government unmanned aircraft flying under Certificates of Authorization, and how can we visualize it? Thanks to Anita in the last post, we have the Class B,C,D,E Airspace Shape Files which helps us define the overall shape of controlled airspace. But, these are 3D things. … Continue reading Airspace is complicated — and so I abuse PostGIS once again

Announcing OpenDroneMap — Software for civilian (and humanitarian?) UAS post processing

This past Friday at FOSS4G in Portland, I announced the (early) release of OpenDroneMap, a software toolchain for civilian (and humanitarian?) UAS/UAV image processing. The software is currently a simple fork of https://github.com/qwesda/BundlerTools, and will process from unreferenced overlapping photos to an unreferenced point cloud. Directions are included in the repo to create a mesh and UV textured mesh as the subsequent steps, but the … Continue reading Announcing OpenDroneMap — Software for civilian (and humanitarian?) UAS post processing