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A bird’s eye view of success

May 12, 2015
The TopoDrone-100 in flight. Photo: DroneMetrex

The TopoDrone-100 in flight. Photo: DroneMetrex

It’s a bit hard to get your mind around the fact that an unmanned aircraft can capture a 25mm image of the earth’s surface in the finest detail with the time the digital photo was taken being recorded to a thousandth of a second.

But that’s what happens with Tom Tadrowski sends one of his drones aloft in Australia, and increasingly elsewhere in the world, to capture high-resolution images of agricultural land, transport corridors, infrastructure, mine sites and even sub-sea landscapes.

The images can be used to support the planning, implementation and monitoring of any activity that requires highly detailed representations of the earth’s surface and structures.

Tom Tadrowski, the managing director of DroneMetrex, seems a modest type and there is no hint of hyperbole when he says the company’s technology and product “is massively in front of the rest of the world – there is no-one even close”.

DroneMetrex is now selling the TopoDrone-100 to the geospatial industry around Australia and in China, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Middle East, North Africa and New Zealand – and will soon reach into Europe – from a research and manufacturing facility in suburban Glenside, where it collaborates with Maptek on production.

To describe DroneMetrex’s technology as sophisticated is an understatement. The key to its success rests on two design features – an ability to capture digital images without being affected by movement of the craft caused by weather conditions, and the precise synchronisation of the imagery’s capture with GPS satellite data.

The DroneMetrex journey began in the mid-1980s when Tadrowski completed a degree in surveying at the University of South Australia and subsequently a masters degree in engineering photogrammetry at University College London in the United Kingdom.

He was running a successful aerial mapping business using conventional aircraft when he saw the potential of digital camera technology being coupled with drones. He sold that firm and, with a couple of highly skilled colleagues, embarked on a new course in 2011.

“The concept was an autonomous mapping system that we could put onto a drone,” Tadrowski told The Vanguard this week.

“The system was very smart, very clever and, by itself, it would do the mapping, irrespective of whether it was on a drone or an airplane.”

He describes 2012 and 2013 as “very much development years – to the extent that halfway through 2012 we threw away everything we had and started again because we got the integration of our system with the drones completely wrong”.

Tadrowski says at this stage the company was “at the bleeding edge rather than the leading edge”.

“We had a rethink and went down a better path,” he said.

The DroneMetrex system captures extraordinary detail.

The DroneMetrex system captures extraordinary detail. Photo: DroneMetrex

DroneMetrex now buys the fuselage and wings of the drone, modifies them and adds its innovative “dynamic stabilised active mount” for the camera systems that nullifies the effect of the drone’s movement, including yaw or sideways movement, during flight.

“The stabilisation, and modification we do to the camera with the GPS to get the millisecond synchronisation, are our real differentiators against other products on the market,” Tadrowski said.

He said the “real smarts are in the data processing” after the drone completes its flight.

While humans have two eyes, the TopoDrone-100 has five “eyes” at the front and sides of the craft and, with overlapping flight paths, captures vast quantities of data.

“The mathematics of a computer can then process many images all at once for all the pixels,” Tadrowski said.

“We process every single pixel – which is quite stunning when you think about it. (Consumers) might have 25-megapixel cameras, but we process every single pixel of every single camera and every single frame taken.”

The synchronisation of the drone’s camera  with GPS data is important because it underpins the precision of the final  imagery. The DroneMetrex system captures highly accurate American, European and Chinese GPS data and synchronises it to the millisecond with the camera’s shutter as its takes images of the earth’s surface below.

Tadrowski says a high level of accuracy is not so important during a flight – “you can be accurate to a couple of metres” – but post-flight it is really important to know exactly where each camera was during each exposure.

“Once you know where you were in the sky and you know your camera system very well, then we have the mathematics to work out where we are on the ground,” he said.

A near infra-red image of agricultural land.

A near infra-red image of agricultural land. Photo: DroneMetrex

Tadrowski said the next frontier in the digital mapping space was “swarming drones – where all the drones are exactly the same with purposely planned flights for covering a large area in parallel”.

He said each drone would be communicating with, and avoiding, each other with the “easy” avoidance technology that now exists. The swarm might involve between 10 and 50 drones which could very effectively map an area of up to 5000 square kilometres.

“With swarming, you start to overcome a number of issues and have the great advantage of the swarm covering an area with the same meteorological conditions. So, if there is a break in the weather, you do the whole job at once.”

So what’s ahead for DroneMetrex?

“Product-wise, we have a vastly superior product but we are a small company marketing-wise,” Tadrowski said.

“We have a good team competing against major companies that have massive marketing resources and I don’t want to be the Beta-VHS story of the world – when you have a better product but how do you get it out there?

“We have a business plan of going through strategic resellers and people are slowly starting to understand that our product is much superior to its competitors.”

DroneMetrex last week announced that it had awarded Dacosmo Company an exclusive contract to resell its mapping drones in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.

Tadrowski said Dacosmo was previously selling “one unit a week of a competitor’s product and say they think they can grow that much more”.

“These start to become big numbers – it changes everything for us,” he said.

“We are well placed with Maptek, which has a very good business of having developed and built a world market for their laser scanners, and they grew their business in software and in hardware to be able to have large production runs.

“Maptek has a good history and experience in how to manage large production runs of a very high technical product and that gives us a lot of confidence.”

DroneMetrex certainly has a different view of the world from most and it is underpinning a very successful South Australian enterprise.

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