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Langdon, ND | On the first note there is surely money in just selling them to prospective buyers and for just general scouting I think they can work great especially with the cheaper models.
Now on the second question you might find trouble in scaling the services of mapping with Infrared sensors or LIDAR. While possible, in talking with many UAV companies and agronomist/consultants that have tested them in a commercial aspect, they both agree that the scalability issues is a huge concern. Its one thing to do a few fields here and there but to scale to tens of thousands or more acres the systems can't really handle that, not to mention the FAA rules. In due time those issues may go away but on mapping services it is going to be tough to get a large amount of acres done in the appropriate time farmers or other Ag companies request images in. I've heard each field can also accumulate up to 4 gigabytes of data each at a high resolution which most will do since you have to fly under 400 feet. The data transfer and stitching issues itself also cause a big problem if scaled to a lot of acres since it can take with today's software many hours or in some cases days to clean up on field. I'm sure the industry will get there sooner than later but I'd wait till some of those issues are figured out first before getting into mapping services yourself with a UAV.
In the mean time if you are serious about getting NIR, NDVI, etc... data for agronomy purposes I would highly recommend looking into satellite imagery or a local aerial pilot to help map acres. Those services are well established, scalable, and cost effective compared to any UAV system out there at this time and the resolution they provide is more than enough data to make informed decisions unless your looking for doing stand counts from a UAV (more difficult than it sounds IMO).
Either way I hope this info helps and best of luck in the future. UAV's will be a part of the solution regardless but more powerful combined with other data as well. | |
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