Just How Accurate is Your Drone – Real World Testing Results

January 19, 2018 Mike Tully

By Mike Tully

January 19, 2018

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9 Comments

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About Mike Tully

Mike Tully has been the President & CEO of Aerial Services, Inc. (Cedar Falls, IA) since 2002. He is a certified photogrammetrist, and has a B.S. in Forestry from Northern Arizona University, a M.S. in Forestry Entomology from the University of Maine, and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Northern Iowa. He is a certified GIS-Professional, techno-geek, and the head of "Getting Right Things Done Well" at Aerial Services. Mike is an innovator and thinker.

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9 Comments

Lewis Graham 2 years ago

Hi Mike,
You will get much better results with a mechanical shutter. For the DJI, try the X4s – very nice camera (and less expensive than the X5s).
I am surprised at the very large vertical error. We are typically seeing an RMSE of about 5 cm vertical and seldom ever more than 10 cm Peak to Peak (bare earth such as mining but even with very large vertical elevation ranges such as deep pits).

We have also found a lot of the DJI mission control apps to be less than desirable. We finally settled on DJI Ground Station Pro. It works quite well.

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  Mike Tully 2 years ago
  
  Good tips. Thanks, Lewis. I share your low confidence using rolling shutter cameras after seeing these results. Your observation about large vertical error is interesting. Our results may be higher because the photogrammetrically-derived DEMs we tested were not edited. The only bare-earth DEMs we tested were from the Riegl VUX on the Vapor 55 and the Leica ALS70 in the manned aircraft.
  
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    Mike Tully 2 years ago
    
    Thanks, Lewis. I share your low confidence using rolling shutter cameras after seeing these results and others. Your observation about large vertical error is interesting. Our results may be higher because the photogrammetrically-derived DEMs we tested were not edited. The only bare-earth DEMs we tested were from the Riegl VUX on the Vapor 55 and the Leica ALS70 in the manned aircraft.
    
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Brian Forrester 2 years ago

Hi Mike,
Figure 8: I am not seeing the difference between Full Control and Some Control….different scale, but basically same result?

Brian

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  Mike Tully 2 years ago
  
  My apologies. Figure 8b was a misprint. It has been updated to reflect the correct results.
  
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stacy lunsford 2 years ago

Thank You Mike!

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Mikael Sejersen 2 years ago

Any chance that the article will come for download/read again?

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W. B. Mitchell 2 years ago

Is this article going to be back up anytime soon? I’m getting an error on this page.

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W. B. Mitchell 2 years ago

I would still like to read this article. Can you send me an updated link?

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