[Talk-GB] Drone Surveying

[Brian Prangle]

Using drones to capture up-to-date aerial imagery seems a great way to
capture map data given the aged nature of the aerial imagery available to
us. However the CAA regulations and insurance requirements in the UK
provide a pretty insuperable obstacle for OSMUK with our limited means.
Requisitioning commercial drone operations is definitely beyond our budget

However we don't want to give up and OSMUK would like to form a Drones
Working Group to explore how we can exploit this opportunity. Thanks to
MapBox we now have a contact with a drone flightplanning company based in
the UK, who are willing to provide some insight into the drone surveying
market to aid our discussions.

I'm thinking we should use the upcoming map disruption caused by HS2 as a
big use case and also to use new housing developments and other big civil
engineering projects as smaller use cases. Once we have a better
understanding of how the drone surveying market works we could (off the top
of my head here) apply for grant funding to commission our own commercial
drone surveys; lobby public sector organisation who use drones to let us
have their imagery as opendata; maybe even get drone companies to donate a
couple of hours here and there especially if they become OSMUK corporate
members because they "get" OSM; get drone survey customers to release their
imagery say a year after they've used it (commercial value decreased and
they should have got their value extracted form it).

So if you have any knowledge or experience of drone surveying or have any
contacts in the market and want to see the technology being used in the UK
to benefit OSM then join our working group.

This is a cross post from the OSMUK Loomio discussion site so apologies to
members from there if you're seeing this for a second time

Regards


Brian
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