DroneMapper Update: Continued Support, Software Maturity, and Future Focus

JP Uncategorized

To our valued users and the wider geospatial community, we want to provide a brief update on the status and future of our products. In an industry that moves at a breakneck pace, we believe it's important to reaffirm our commitment to the tools you rely on.

DroneMapper Photogrammetry Software: Mature, Stable, and Supported

We are proud of the maturity and stability that our core DroneMapper photogrammetry software, including REMOTE EXPERT, has achieved. For years, professionals have trusted our Windows-based application to process high-quality digital elevation models (DEMs), orthomosaics, point clouds, and more, right on their desktop. Forget the hassle and time of uploading massive datasets to the cloud; our focus has always been on providing powerful, field-ready processing capabilities.

We want to be clear: DroneMapper software is actively supported, and licenses are still being sold. Our team continues to provide dedicated customer support and ensure the software you've invested in remains a reliable workhorse for your photogrammetric needs. We are committed to helping you generate the best possible outputs from your aerial imagery.

Sunsetting AquaBits: A Shift in Focus

As we refine our focus, we must also make strategic decisions about our product portfolio. Our terrestrial sensor product for water management, AquaBits, will be reaching its "end of life." We will officially discontinue AquaBits at the end of the current water season, concluding support on October 31, 2025.

We are proud of the innovative work we did with AquaBits in the water resource management space, developing real-time solutions for monitoring flowing water and reservoir capacities. We want to thank all our AquaBits customers and partners for their trust and collaboration. This decision allows us to concentrate our development resources on enhancing and expanding the DroneMapper ecosystem.

A Potential Open Source Future

We have always been supporters of the open-source community and have released some projects on our GitHub page in the past. Looking ahead, we are considering the possibility of fully open-sourcing the DroneMapper Windows application and its backend source code. This step would depend heavily on generating sufficient interest from the user and developer communities to support and contribute to the project's future. We are excited by this possibility and will be evaluating community feedback on this topic.

Our Continued Commitment

DroneMapper remains dedicated to providing powerful and accessible photogrammetry solutions. Whether you are a long-time user of REMOTE EXPERT or are just discovering our tools, we are here to support your work. We are excited about the future and our continued development of our powerful desktop tools.

Thank you for being part of the DroneMapper community.

The DroneMapper Team

DroneMapper Software Updates 2022

JP Uncategorized

We've released a new version of the software with new features:

  • Orthomosaic optimizations & disk space fixes
  • New GeoTagger function (accepts csv with image names or timestamp for tagging) – BETA
  • New MicaSense image stacker (stacks raw micasense images w/ radiometric corrections) – BETA
  • UI tweaks & fixes
  • UI progress bar and tasks processing fixes
  • New Sentera image stacker (stacks raw sentera images w/ radiometric corrections) – COMING NEXT RELEASE!

    • Please see our Medium page for more details on the Image Stacker and Geotag feature:
    https://medium.com/@dronemapper

    Water Resource Management – Drone Mapping and AquaBits

    JP Uncategorized

    DroneMapper recently mapped a mid-sized reservoir, Hotel Twin Lake, located on the top of the Grand Mesa in Colorado, USA. Figure 1 shows a Google image of the lake at full capacity:



    Hotel Twin was drained to its deadpool prior to our drone imagery collection and placement of aerial targets for mapping and ground surveying. 342 images were acquired using a Phantom 3 Advanced drone and six (6) aerial targets or Ground Control Points (GCPs) were precisely ground surveyed for XYZ locations. The imagery and GCPs were processed using REMOTE EXPERT software. Figure 2 illustrates the DEM with GCPs constructed of the reservoir basin:



    The ground survey of the GCPs was performed using a Trimble GPS/RTK 5800 Base and Rover communicating over a 25-watt UHF Trimble radio (TrimMark 3). The GCP ground surveyed elevations were compared to the elevations measured on the DEM and are shown in Table 1:



    Using Global Mapper GIS software (Blue Marble Geographics, Hallowell Maine) 1-foot contours were generated from the gate valve invert (reservoir’s drain) up to spill. Figure 3 illustrates the DEM with contours superimposed:



    Reservoir storage capacity (acre-feet) was computed for each 1-foot contour. The data was fit to a 3rd-order polynomial as shown in the following Figure 4 plot:



    The coefficient of determination, R2, indicates an exceptionally good fit with the 3rd-order polynomial model. You may be asking “what do you do with the polynomial model?” Topic of next discussion -

    AquaBits – Real Time Monitoring of Water Resources

    AquaBits is an accurate water resource monitor measuring/reporting gage height of reservoirs and open channels in real time. Water gage height is measured using an immersible hydrostatic pressure, industrial grade sensor. AquaBits reads the sensor at prescribed intervals and sends the measurement using either cellular or satellite communication modems to our aquabits.io web site within 1-minute of data acquisition. Figure 5 illustrates an AquaBits installation for an open channel application:



    AquaBits is shown to the left with Colorado state instruments to the right. For Hotel Twin Lake AquaBits was mounted to an existing steel support structure as shown in Figure 6:



    The water sensor is run from the electronics box (just below the solar panel) to the reservoir’s gate valve invert or drain. For this application AquaBits reports every 6-hours and the stored capacity as a function of water elevation is computed using the previously described polynomial model. The lake’s location is remote with no cellular service dictating the use of a satellite modem for data transfer to aquabits.io. Figure 7 shows recent July 2021 data from aquabits.io indicating a slow growth of storage capacity over a couple of days.



    This type of data is particularly useful to understand water ingress, discharge, lake evaporation and possibly predict reservoir’s storage through winter and spring months prior to full thaw and start of the next irrigation season.

    Special Equipment and Software Offer

    DroneMapper has a hot July special equipment and software offering – a complete drone mapping system with Trimble ground survey and processing software including the following:

    • DJI Phantom 3 Advanced drone complete with Pelican roller case (see Figure 8):
      Less than 1 hour flight time on P3A (used as backup spare for our operations),
      Additional NIR modified camera (NIR,G,B) used for crop health monitoring,
      Value estimated at $500-1,000 (used)


    • Trimble GPS RTK 5800 Base, Rover and UHF Radio complete, housed within two cases (see Figures 9 & 10):
      Base and Rover Receivers (batteries/charger included),
      TSC Controller (battery/charger included),
      2-10-25-watt, 450-470 MHz Radio (battery not included)
      All cables and antennas,
      Value estimated at $3,000-4,000 (used)




    • Perpetual license for REMOTE EXPERT photogrammetric processing software:
      Produce DEMs, orthos, point clouds, with or without GCPs,
      License cost - $999

    • Complete precision mapping system offered at $3,500 plus shipping. All you need to add is the aerial targets, tripods and survey rods.

    • Thanks for looking at our blog and please contact us with any questions regarding mapping, AquaBits or our special. The very best for this summer and onwards!

    DroneMapper Photogrammetry Software Updates 2021

    JP Uncategorized

    We've been busy working on enhancements to the DroneMapper Photogrammetry Software package and a handful of exciting enterprise projects! Please take a look at the software changelog below for the latest updates and features. We always appreciate customer suggestions and feedback to improve our offerings. Please contact us anytime with your ideas!

    Thanks, DroneMapper Team

    February 10th, 2021 - v1.9.2 20210210
    • Customer suggested feature: change resolution of RGB orthomosaic preview. Default setting is 8x native GSD with new settings options for 4x GSD and 2x GSD. Allows rapid production of RGB preview orthomosaic in the field supporting disaster mapping and emergency operations.
    color orthomosaic
    January 22nd, 2021 - v1.9.1 20210122
    • Remove twitter icon/link from UI
    • Remove license clean exe (false flag as malware by anti-virus)
    November 26th, 2020 - v1.9.1 20201126
    • Bitcoin, Eth and other crypto payments accepted via coinbase.com
    • Enhance GPU tie point generator, performance optimizations
    November 4th, 2020 - v1.9.1 20201104
    • New tie point reduction algorithm. Useful for large datasets, imagery with large feature counts, or when using Brisk/Akaze/Multi-Scale TP. Algorithm filters and selects the best tie points based on score, limits tie points to a reasonable count per image pair. Speeds up large dataset processing.
    • Initial CUDA based tie-point detector and feature matching. Requires a NVIDIA GPU and driver >= 418.39 (beta), utilizes CPU and GPU CUDA cores.
      CUDA SDK: 10.1 (10.1.105) DRIVER >= 418.39 NVIDIA CUDA: Ver 10.1 - CUFFT CUBLAS NVIDIA GPU Archs: 30 35 37 50 52 60 61 70 75
    October 26th, 2020 - v1.9 20201026
    • Fix for GCP processing in Stereo/Per Image Matching mode
    • UI and about dialog updates
    • Update to latest exiftool v12.06

    AquaBits.io Cutting Edge Water Management Solutions

    JP Uncategorized

    aquabits sensor
    In the last few months DroneMapper has developed a terrestrial sensor (AquaBits IoT) focused on water resource management. This post describes our development, verification and capabilities for an affordable, real time device sensing flowing water in channels and continuous measurement of reservoir holding capacities. Previously we described the use of drone imagery collection, precision imagery processing and generation of reservoir basin contours from the DEM for water elevation correlation to storage capacity. This data can now be augmented with real time reporting of actual reservoir stage at any frequency of interest, with little latency to water managers.

    AquaBits utilizes accurate hydrostatic pressure measurement of the water column and is self contained inclusive of a power subsystem and communication capability using either cellular (when available) or satellite for remote locations. Data is transmitted to our secure dashboard where it is archived and processed for discharge in a flowing channel or current water stage in a reservoir. A slide deck with an overview of AquaBits and recently collected data compared to Colorado State instrumentation can be found here: (pdf attached)

    In other scenarios when equipped with the appropriate sensor(s), applications to consider may include soil nutrient/moisture measurement for agriculture, earth subsidence/movement, chemical contamination, water quality, audio/visual surveillance, limited only by the imagination... Feel free to contact us and discuss your specific application.

    The DroneMapper Team

    aquabits.io