Winter 2020 Product Release Wrap-Up

Terrain Awareness

The DroneDeploy Flight App now supports automated Terrain Awareness. With this change, DroneDeploy plans in 3D, automatically adapting drone altitude to follow the contours of the ground and maintain a constant height. This makes it much easier to fly near hills, and to capture accurate maps in high-resolution.

Every DroneDeploy pilot will have access to DroneDeploy’s automated, easy-to-use Terrain Awareness. With Terrain Awareness enabled, your drone will anticipate most terrain changes and make automated adjustments - adding another layer of safety to your drone operations.

Whether you are an agronomist mapping a large field, in forestry taking inventory over hilly terrain or a site manager at a quarry, Terrain Awareness will help improve map quality with consistent resolution. This is the new standard for drone flight.

Available for all account types. Download the latest flight app today.

Inspection 

DroneDeploy’s new Inspection Workflow has allowed customers to reduce risk and promote a culture of quality and accountability on every job site. In our last release, we made it easy to conduct remote inspections within the context of your 3D model. We also made it easy for your field and office teams to collaborate to fix any issue using the same map and model. 

Now your teams can quickly communicate through the new comments stream in the Inspection Workflow. Once you have evaluated your site in 3D, tagged any issues, and added a summary; you can now add comments to each issue and @mention team members that are active on the project. Then all users involved in the issue resolution will also get an up-to-date view of the activity on each issue through email notifications. 

Construction, Energy, and property management companies can now capture their site in 3D and streamline collaboration with full site context and location. By using the same source of truth, teams can make sure everyone is on the same page about active issues on the job site, and team members can help resolve issues without ever coming onsite, keeping people safer and creating an environment of accountability.

Inspection comments are available for Business + Enterprise customers. Contact sales to learn more about our enterprise offerings.

NEW Multispectral Workflow

DroneDeploy’s new multispectral mapping solution for MicaSense and DJI cameras enables agriculture and forestry customers to recover time spent processing and focus on analysis.

Multispectral data analysis allows customers to detect and diagnose potential causes of plant stress much earlier. You can now upload, process, analyze, and export multispectral data captured on the MicaSense Rededge-M, MX, Altum, and DJI P4M sensors. 

Your R&D teams can create a robust, cloud-based workflow from start to finish. Spot crop stress up to 4 weeks earlier than RGB data, allowing growers to treat problems beforehand and increase yield.

Individual growers and agronomists can process high-resolution multispectral data with DroneDeploy that does not bog down their laptops or slow down productivity. Your crop scientists and agronomists can be focussed on analyzing the data, rather than running complex photogrammetry software. All users will now be able to map and measure the correlation of plant health data over time through side by side comparison.

How it works:

• Upload multispectral mapping datasets from Phantom 4 Multispectral or MicaSense multispectral sensors (reflectance panel support coming soon) and process it into a map
• Once your map is processed, you will be able to explore plant health algorithms that use NIR and RE bands, including NDVIR, RSAVI, OSAVI, and GSAVI 
• Export the visual map, plant health layers, and a five-band GeoTIFF including all of the bands from the multispectral dataset

Multispectral Workflow is available for Business + Enterprise customers. Contact sales to learn more about our enterprise offerings.

NEW Shapefile Overlays

You can now upload and visualize shapefiles in DroneDeploy. Shapefiles allow you to easily reference property boundaries, crop prescriptions and yield maps, test pilots, and utility lines in the context of your map. You can make complex crop health diagnosis or identify equipment, infrastructure, and connected systems remotely.

Agriculture professionals can visualize their yield, prescription, and irrigation maps to assist with diagnosis in DroneDeploy. And for energy and utilities, customers can see utility lines, underground pipes, and equipment labels overlaid perfectly on their maps to help in construction and inspection.

Shapefile Overlay is available for Business + Enterprise customers. Contact sales to learn more about our enterprise offerings. 

NEW Reporting for Drone Operations Management

In the Summer 2019 release, we first launched a suite of capabilities to allow our enterprise customers to easily manage their entire drone operations from DroneDeploy; having all of their drone data in one solution. Since that time we have made significant enhancements to all visualizations and reports. 

NEW Compliance Report

The new DroneDeploy Compliance Report will automatically check all Pilots and Drones in use on your account, highlighting any compliance risks to help you make sure that your program is safe and in compliance with all company and government regulations. This report will help you identify and alert you to: 

• Pilots who do not have certification details set
• Any drones used on your account that do not have registration
• Pilots who are in need of a certification refresher
• Equipment that needs to be updated
• The number of recent flights and active pilots and projects

All of the above are captured automatically. No more spreadsheets, or manual effort for your pilots. You can view all compliance data for your drone program in one place - helping you easily scale your program. 

The Compliance Report is only available to Enterprise Platinum customers. To learn more about our enterprise offerings please contact sales. 

Enhanced Equipment Management Report

The enhanced Equipment Management Report helps you quickly identify the last known location, pilot, and project of any drone flown by your team. As an admin of your program, you will now be able to delegate equipment management to the assigned pilot or team leads, allowing them to set the operational status and registration details for each drone.

The Equipment Management Report is only available to Enterprise Platinum customers. To learn more about our enterprise offerings please contact sales. 

Reminder: Check out the New Projects Experience 

NOW live for all customers - login today to check it out. You have about a month left to where you can toggle back to the old Projects view. After mid-February, we will no longer support the previous experience.