Preface

This series of manuals are intended to facilitate the safe use and teaching of Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS, aka drones) to a wide variety of programs and teaching areas at BCIT. The ubiquitous and positively disruptive nature of RPAS make them an excellent additional tool for the collection of spatially accurate data including photos and videos in a variety of applications. From Geomatics to Forestry and from Marketing to Forensics, RPAS are quickly becoming indispensable due to their rapid deployment capability, ability to provide a unique perspective in difficult to reach areas and safely gather a rich data set in a short amount of time.

The demand for data captured by RPAS is increasing at BCIT, across the province and in fact, around the globe. These manuals aim to rapidly and effectively transfer knowledge to those who are interested in leveraging this technology in their specific fields of interest and expertise. The manuals are divided into two main categories; Image Acquisition and Image Processing. The Image Acquisition manuals are vehicle- and sensor-specific with the goal of being able to pick a specific unmanned aerial vehicle and sensor combination and fly a pre-programmed, semi-autonomous mission in order to gather a specific set of images or videos. The Image Processing manuals can be used as standalone or as a follow-on from the Image Acquisition manuals. These focus on the most effective photogrammetric processing techniques in Agisoft Photoscan (and/or MetaShape) Professional, given the specific data set and image type. Each of the Image Processing manuals is accompanied by a sample data set that provides a complete walk-through of the processing steps or they can be used to generate a variety of different 3-D mapping products using a user-supplied images.