2019 was a successful year for DroneDeploy, and that success would not have been possible without the over 1M flights performed by you, our customers. As we move into the new year, we are excited to kick things off with the 2020 Winter Product Release.
By continuously investing in our processing speed and technology, we can provide you with the fastest and most accurate representations of your sites and fields. In this release, we were able to increase our processing speed by 25% and still deliver the highest quality maps and models you have all come to expect.
As we continue to grow and expand our flight capabilities, today, we are happy to deliver the most requested feature in our recent pilot survey: Terrain Awareness. With this new enhancement, you will be confident that your drone will rise and descend with the slope of the terrain, capturing higher resolution images with more reliable coverage.
We have also expanded our Inspection Workflow to include comments and @mentions to help you resolve issues faster with your field and office teams.
For those of you with multispectral sensors and drones, we have added the ability to upload, process, and analyze multispectral data.
Finally, we are delivering the industry’s first fully automated compliance report along with improved equipment profiles to our suite of enterprise reporting in Drone Operations Management.
Terrain Awareness
The DroneDeploy Flight App now supports automated Terrain Awareness. With this change, DroneDeploy plans in 3D, automatically adapting drone altitude to follow the contours of the ground and maintain a constant height. This makes it much easier to fly near hills, and to capture accurate maps in high-resolution.
Every DroneDeploy pilot will have access to DroneDeploy’s automated, easy-to-use Terrain Awareness. With Terrain Awareness enabled, your drone will anticipate most terrain changes and make automated adjustments - adding another layer of safety to your drone operations.
Whether you are an agronomist mapping a large field, in forestry taking inventory over hilly terrain or a site manager at a quarry, Terrain Awareness will help improve map quality with consistent resolution. This is the new standard for drone flight.
Available for all account types. Download the latest flight app today.
Inspection
DroneDeploy’s new Inspection Workflow has allowed customers to reduce risk and promote a culture of quality and accountability on every job site. In our last release, we made it easy to conduct remote inspections within the context of your 3D model. We also made it easy for your field and office teams to collaborate to fix any issue using the same map and model.
Now your teams can quickly communicate through the new comments stream in the Inspection Workflow. Once you have evaluated your site in 3D, tagged any issues, and added a summary; you can now add comments to each issue and @mention team members that are active on the project. Then all users involved in the issue resolution will also get an up-to-date view of the activity on each issue through email notifications.
Construction, Energy, and property management companies can now capture their site in 3D and streamline collaboration with full site context and location. By using the same source of truth, teams can make sure everyone is on the same page about active issues on the job site, and team members can help resolve issues without ever coming onsite, keeping people safer and creating an environment of accountability.
Inspection comments are available for Business + Enterprise customers. Contact sales to learn more about our enterprise offerings.
NEW Multispectral Workflow
DroneDeploy’s new multispectral mapping solution for MicaSense and DJI cameras enables agriculture and forestry customers to recover time spent processing and focus on analysis.
Multispectral data analysis allows customers to detect and diagnose potential causes of plant stress much earlier. You can now upload, process, analyze, and export multispectral data captured on the MicaSense Rededge-M, MX, Altum, and DJI P4M sensors.
People using aerial imagery in agriculture need fast, accurate processing at the field’s edge. Pairing our sensors with DroneDeploy’s quick and easy-to-use software is a measurable step towards making multispectral imagery an integral part of the precision agriculture workflow.
- Eric Waters, General Manager, MicaSense
Your R&D teams can create a robust, cloud-based workflow from start to finish. Spot crop stress up to 4 weeks earlier than RGB data, allowing growers to treat problems beforehand and increase yield.
Individual growers and agronomists can process high-resolution multispectral data with DroneDeploy that does not bog down their laptops or slow down productivity. Your crop scientists and agronomists can be focussed on analyzing the data, rather than running complex photogrammetry software. All users will now be able to map and measure the correlation of plant health data over time through side by side comparison.
How it works:
- Upload multispectral mapping datasets from Phantom 4 Multispectral or MicaSense multispectral sensors (reflectance panel support coming soon) and process it into a map
- Once your map is processed, you will be able to explore plant health algorithms that use NIR and RE bands, including NDVIR, RSAVI, OSAVI, and GSAVI
- Export the visual map, plant health layers, and a five-band GeoTIFF including all of the bands from the multispectral dataset
Multispectral Workflow is available for Business + Enterprise customers. Contact sales to learn more about our enterprise offerings.
NEW Shapefile Overlays
You can now upload and visualize shapefiles in DroneDeploy. Shapefiles allow you to easily reference property boundaries, crop prescriptions and yield maps, test pilots, and utility lines in the context of your map. You can make complex crop health diagnosis or identify equipment, infrastructure, and connected systems remotely.
Agriculture professionals can visualize their yield, prescription, and irrigation maps to assist with diagnosis in DroneDeploy. And for energy and utilities, customers can see utility lines, underground pipes, and equipment labels overlaid perfectly on their maps to help in construction and inspection.
Shapefile Overlay is available for Business + Enterprise customers. Contact sales to learn more about our enterprise offerings.
NEW Reporting for Drone Operations Management
In the Summer 2019 release, we first launched a suite of capabilities to allow our enterprise customers to easily manage their entire drone operations from DroneDeploy; having all of their drone data in one solution. Since that time we have made significant enhancements to all visualizations and reports.
NEW Compliance Report
The new DroneDeploy Compliance Report will automatically check all Pilots and Drones in use on your account, highlighting any compliance risks to help you make sure that your program is safe and in compliance with all company and government regulations. This report will help you identify and alert you to:
- Pilots who do not have certification details set
- Any drones used on your account that do not have registration
- Pilots who are in need of a certification refresher
- Equipment that needs to be updated
- The number of recent flights and active pilots and projects
All of the above are captured automatically. No more spreadsheets, or manual effort for your pilots. You can view all compliance data for your drone program in one place - helping you easily scale your program.
The Compliance Report is only available to Enterprise Platinum customers. To learn more about our enterprise offerings please contact sales.
Enhanced Equipment Management Report
The enhanced Equipment Management Report helps you quickly identify the last known location, pilot, and project of any drone flown by your team. As an admin of your program, you will now be able to delegate equipment management to the assigned pilot or team leads, allowing them to set the operational status and registration details for each drone.
The Equipment Management Report is only available to Enterprise Platinum customers. To learn more about our enterprise offerings please contact sales.
Reminder: Check out the New Projects Experience
NOW live for all customers - login today to check it out. You have about a month left to where you can toggle back to the old Projects view. After mid-February, we will no longer support the previous experience.
What is new?
- Quick Access: Nearby and recently accessed projects appear instantly at the top of the page
- Search: With our new search engine, you can jump directly to the project you need all with a simple search
- Sub-folders: Create a folder structure that matches your other shared drives
Available for all account types
Winter Product Release Webinar
Join us on Feb 5, 2020, at 10 am PST to hear from our team on how you can leverage these new capabilities to advance your drone program and better analyze your data. We will be hosting the webinar through the DroneDeploy Academy, so make sure to register first for the Academy (if you haven't already), to not just gain access to this webinar, but also all of the training materials from DroneDeploy. Register Today!
DroneDeploy Academy
The DroneDeploy Academy is a comprehensive free training program focused on learning the basics of drone operations and how drones can benefit your business. You will quickly become a DroneDeploy expert by learning the fundamentals of how to capture and analyze drone imagery and apply them to everyday business problems. Join the DroneDeploy Academy today!
