How it works
From the paddock
to the answer
Eight steps, in the order they happen. Two of them are you flying and waiting; the rest take minutes.
01 / Plan the flight
Plan the flight
Draw the ground you want covered and say what you are flying it with. The platform works out the path, the spacing and the altitude from the camera’s own geometry and the overlap you ask for, and tells you the ground resolution and the frame count before you leave the office.
You leave knowing how many batteries and how much card.
02 / Fly it
Fly it
Fly the plan with the aircraft you already have. Nothing on the aircraft has to change and no particular airframe is required — what matters is that the frames carry their position, their height above take-off and the camera’s attitude, which is what an ordinary survey flight records.
Bring the card back, or upload from the field.
03 / Upload the frames
Upload the frames
Drop the card’s contents into the browser. The upload is resumable, so a dropped connection costs the seconds it takes to reconnect rather than the hours already sent; frames the platform already holds are settled without being sent again. Each one is checked against its own checksum before it counts as arrived.
Several hundred frames and several gigabytes is the ordinary case, not the hard one.
04 / The platform stitches it
The platform stitches it
The survey joins a queue and is reconstructed on the platform’s own GPU: an orthomosaic, a surface model, a bare-earth model and a point cloud. This is the long step — an hour or two for a real survey — and it needs nobody sitting over it. The map shows the ground that was flown and says what it is waiting on until the imagery is ready.
You are told when it lands; you do not have to watch it.
05 / Look at the ground
Look at the ground
The finished survey is on the map at the resolution the imagery actually holds. Switch between the imagery, the surface and the terrain. Earlier flights of the same ground are found by where the camera was rather than by what anybody filed them under, so this paddock last season is one click away.
This is where most of the work happens.
06 / Ask it a question
Ask it a question
Pick an area and pick an analysis — trees, stockpile volume, water flow, watercourses, slope, erosion, buried pipe. Each returns figures and shapes drawn over the imagery, with the caveats that apply to that ground stated rather than left to be discovered.
Minutes, not hours — and it says how far along it is.
07 / Teach it your own
Teach it your own
When the question is one nobody wrote a rule for, outline forty examples on your own imagery and train a model on them. It then appears beside the built-in analyses and behaves like one. Run it, mark what it got right and wrong, and train it again on the corrections.
Optional. Plenty of operators never need it.
08 / Take the answer away
Take the answer away
Everything leaves. Points and outlines as GeoJSON, CSV, KML, KMZ, GPX, GeoPackage or Shapefile; a visiting route ordered so the crossings are gone; a one-page survey report as a PDF over your own name; and any layer cropped to an area you draw.
Into the handheld, the farm software, or the client’s inbox.
Where it runs
On one machine, at your operator’s address
Every operator has its own address — yourcompany.outbackdrone.com
— and imagery never leaves it. The reconstruction, the analyses and any
model you train all run on the platform’s own hardware, so your frames
are not sent to a third party to be processed or learned from.
The full list of what the platform can do is on Features.