Pro tip: mapping a dig site with a drone and a cheap app changed everything for me

I was working on a small dig near Flagstaff last month, just me and two students. We had a 20 meter square to document, and the usual grid and string method was taking forever in the rocky soil. I got frustrated after two days of slow progress. I remembered my old DJI Mini 2 drone in my truck and a free photogrammetry app I'd downloaded called Meshroom. On a whim, I flew the drone over the site at about 30 feet, taking a bunch of overlapping pictures. I fed the photos into the app on my laptop that night. The next morning, I had a full 3D model of the entire trench, with every stone and feature marked to scale. It cut our mapping time down by about 70% and let us spot a subtle posthole pattern we'd missed. Has anyone else used consumer drones for small-scale site recording? What's your workflow?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthony_fox909d ago

Meshroom's free but needs a good GPU. Try WebODM instead?

reese1779d ago

My old laptop ran WebODM like a slideshow, @anthony_fox90.