The DroneDeploy and Trimble partnership: drone mapping accuracy by default

This past week, Trimble announced their partnership with DroneDeploy as part of GeoWeek 2024 in Denver, Colorado. 

And in a sea of strategic alignments and announcements from the world of construction tech and reality capture, it can be hard to understand the meaning and purpose of these actions. 

Fortunately, the partnership with Trimble is a simple narrative that follows the arc of DroneDeploy’s growing advancements in the realm of high-accuracy drone mapping and surveying.  

So, before we talk about the Trimble announcement, let’s take a moment to just sum-up just a few of the high-accuracy features and materials we’ve launched in the past 12 months:

• The world’s first, instant real time kinematic (RRTK) workflow delivering inch accuracy
• Machine learning Digital Terrain Models
• 3D DXFs
• GCPs in custom coordinates
• Single GCP processing for RTK and PPK (solid map alignment in all dimensions)
• The Complete Guide to High Accuracy Drone Mapping

We acknowledge that for many reading this post, you have grown tired of scratching your heads over the terminology mentioned above. Maybe, in an attempt to create accurate maps you’ve had to lay out burdensome GCPs? Maybe you’ve struggled with the complexity of achieving accurate measurements with RTK, which required complicated and expensive credentials and a patchwork system of networks? And then maybe, just maybe, your life became even more complicated when you had to operate in custom coordinates?

At DroneDeploy, our aim is to simplify the very complex science of drone surveying. We want our users to be able to focus on being world-class builders, not wasting their time on side quests to become GIS experts. It has to become automatic, it has to become the default.

With that context in mind, the partnership with Trimble had to result in a practical and functional output that followed that ethos. 

So what did we announce? 

Leveraging Trimble’s rich and tested history in post-processing corrections technology (Trimble Applanix) to create accurate data combined with the simplicity and ease of use of DroneDeploy mapping technology, we produced the next level of functionality in our High Accuracy quest: DroneDeploy Drag and Drop PPK.

This combination of survey grade accuracy and simplicity removes the need for additional desktop software – or the workflow of uploading your images to another service to have them corrected.

From our perspective, that’s just way too hard. So, with DroneDeploy PPK, simply drag and drop the survey folder from your drone into SmartUploader and we will intelligently recognize the PPK data and process it automatically! Yep, it’s really that easy.

And finally, DroneDeploy PPK works with all of these amazing drones: 

• The Mavic 3 Enterprise RTK
• The Phantom 4 pro RTK
• and of course RTK-equipped M300s and M350s

…basically any DJI drone with an RTK module attached. And soon we’ll be adding support for Skydio x10 and Wingtra One, as well.

What next?

For those who attended the recent session from our virtual Power Up Summit featuring our very own Adam Carp and Trimble’s Mohamed Mostafa, you will have caught a sneak peek at the findings of a PPK whitepaper that’s in the works. And if you missed it, watch this session and the entire virtual summit on-demand at this link.

If you are in doubt and have questions about the true accuracy of PPK and drone mapping technology, you won’t want to miss the final output of this report, which will be published on dronedeploy.com at the end of February.

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