DroneMapper offers an affordable solution designed to enable continuous stockpile monitoring at any sized operation,Pierre Stoermer, CEO, said. The company’s main offering is photogrammetric software. “Either we process imagery for the client or the client licenses our Windows-based application(s) for their own use,” he said. “We also offer end-to-end training on drone and camera selection, use of aftermarket applications for autonomous, high-quality imagery collections, imagery processing and extraction of value-added info using GIS software.” Unlike many of its competitors, DroneMapper has already broken into the coal space.

For the last five years, Arch Coal used DroneMapper to process drone-captured images and data from its West Elk site. Arch also tapped the company to demo drone-based solutions at Thunder Basin, in northeast Wyoming. “They are interested in volumetrics, but they are really interested in safety and measurements of toes and crests, and to get measurements of slopes to determine if a slope is dangerous for cave-in,” Stoermer said. The demo went well, he said. “Arch Coal has provided positive feedback.”

DroneMapper is finalizing a white paper that will reveal how drone-based stockpile volumetrics solutions cut costs compared to traditional methods and facilitate continuous monitoring, Stoermer said. Toward both ends, multiple reports can be generated within a workday, empowering the miner with near-time actionable data, he said. To get there, the miner can purchase a perpetual license for the software ($2,000), run its own flights and handle its own data. “With a drone overflight, and if they did the processing themselves, they could eliminate the latency of sending images to us,” he said. “They could utilize our software process right after they collect the data and yield results within two to four hours or maybe less.”

The company offers training, which usually runs two days. It also offers exclusive online tutorials and hassle-free support, Stoermer said. “Our greatest differentiator is that you can speak with a human nearly anytime for support and there is no smoke and mirrors communicated.”