OUTBACKDEPLOY

Getting started

Outback Deploy turns a folder of photographs taken from a drone into ground you can measure: a map, an elevation model, and answers to questions like how much is in that heap or where does the water go.

It does not fly the aircraft. It plans the flight, takes what comes back, and tells you what is in it.

Your address

Every operator gets their own address. If you signed up as Kestrel Surveys and chose the name kestrel, everything you do is at:

https://kestrel.outbackdrone.com

That address is yours. Your surveys, your models, your people and your results live behind it and are not visible from anybody else's. Bookmark it — signing in at the front door works too, but it has to ask you which operator you meant.

If you have forgotten it, go to https://www.outbackdrone.com/login, enter your email address, and it will show you every operator that address can sign in to.

The shape of the thing

Work moves through four stages, and each one is a tab across the top.

  1. Plan — draw the ground you want covered and the platform works out the flight: the lines to fly, how high, and how many photographs it will take.
  2. Survey — upload the card. The platform reconstructs a map and an elevation model from the overlap between frames.
  3. Analyse — ask a question of the reconstructed ground. Volumes, slope, water, erosion, trees, buried pipe, or something you have taught it yourself.
  4. Export — take the answer away as a file, a report, or a link.

You can start at stage two. If you already have imagery from a flight somebody else planned, upload it and skip straight to the analysis.

The first flight, end to end

Draw the area. Open Flight plans, click New, and draw a shape over the ground. Pick the aircraft you are flying from the list — the platform uses its camera to work out the spacing. Save it. See Planning a flight.

Fly it. Export the plan to your controller, or read the lines off the screen. The platform does not talk to the aircraft.

Upload the card. Open Surveys, click New survey, and drag the whole folder of JPEGs in. It reads the GPS and the camera angle out of each one, and tells you straight away if something is wrong — frames without position, frames shot too far off vertical, gaps in the coverage. See Uploading and reconstruction.

Wait. Reconstruction runs on a graphics card shared between everybody on the platform. A few hundred frames is usually well under an hour. You will get an email when it finishes; you do not need to keep the page open.

Ask a question. Open the finished survey, choose Analyse, and pick one. See Analyses.

Take it away. Every result exports to GeoJSON, KML, GeoPackage, Shapefile, CSV, GPX, or a PDF report. See Getting the answers out.

What you need

  • A drone that records GPS position in the EXIF of each photograph. Nearly all of them do.
  • Photographs that overlap. This is the whole trick — the platform infers three-dimensional shape from the same ground appearing in several frames from slightly different places. A set of photographs that do not overlap cannot be reconstructed at all, no matter how good they are.
  • A browser. There is nothing to install.

What it costs to try

The free trial runs fourteen days and includes one flight plan, one survey and one analysis, over an area up to 100 hectares. That is enough to fly a real paddock and get a real answer, which is the only way to tell whether this suits you. See Trials, plans and billing.