Some thoughts on Drone Imagery Economics and general Drone Economics. What the cheap drones, appropriate algorithms, cheap Cloud Computing and lots of OpenSource resources such as drone OSes and open drone hardware designes mean to the mapping industry at large.

1. Drone Imagery
Economics
Martin Scholl
@zeit_geist
m@martin-scholl.com

2. Mapping Cost
will be zero.

3. Maps will be
made for
humans
machines.

6. • Started by Stephen Mather on Apr 2014
• self-described as “an Open Source Toolkit for
Processing Drone Imagery”
• 31 contributors
• installation takes 10m on EC2
• dead easy usage: ./run.pl in images directory

7. Open-
Drone-
Map
Point Cloud
Ortho-
photo.
…
(Textured)
Digital
Surface
Model

14. • OpenDroneMap makes drone imagery data
processing as easy as running a single command
• ~80pics take 1h10m on a 16-core EC2 machine
• but: several steps are quadratic in runtime
in # images and resolution
• performance improvements underway
• Where to host drone Orthophotos?

15. • OpenAerialMap is infrastructure for a “simple open
way to host and provide access to imagery”*
• Re-Initiated by HOT in 2015; grant from
Humanitarian Innovation Fund
• “supporting humanitarian organizations involved in
emergency preparedness and response
activities”**
* https://github.com/hotosm/OpenAerialMap
** https://docs.google.com/document/d/
1Cyj3x4MWzif3avAviELNaRThKhBdDoAA0sy38kwyH_g/edit

16. http://beta.openaerialmap.org/

17. http://beta.openaerialmap.org/
0. Search & Filter

18. http://beta.openaerialmap.org/
1. Select Area
0. Search & Filter

19. http://beta.openaerialmap.org/
1. Select Area
2. Download
Orthoimages0. Search & Filter

20. OpenAerialMap
• OpenSource Project & Infrastructure
• Solves rapid sharing of imagery data for
humanitarian purposes
• Clever data federation architecture by separating
indexing from data storage leveraging
Object Storage (Amazon S3)
• mostly satellite images & some drone imagery
• 1.1k images indexed yet

21. A Bigger Picture
• OpenDroneMap: free drone image processing
• OpenAerialMap: free 2D image hosting, etc.
• OpenTerrain: free terrain model hosting, etc.
• ArduPilot: free flight control & automation
• DIY Drones, OpenUAV, et. al.: free UAV blueprints

22. Drone Imagery
Economics

23. Drone Imagery Economics
101 w/ OpenDroneMap
• Drone w/ 4K camera: $1000 range
• Storing 250 high-res images: $0.01 / month
(Google Cloud Storage)
• Processing those images: 2h or ~$0.40
(AWS EC2 c4.x4large spot instances)
• 4k Camera @ 1cm resolution & 50% overlap:
250 pictures cover 0.2km2

24. 5 times a day, 1 drone
surveying 0.2km2
Per Day Per Month Per Year
Drone* $0.92 $27.78 $333
Data Storage $0.05 $1.50 $117
Data
Processing
$2.00 $60.00 $720
Covered Area 1km2 30km2 360km2
Total Cost ~$3 $90 $1170
* 3y amortization

25. 5 times a day, 1 drone
surveying 0.2km2
Per Day Per Month Per Year
Drone* $0.92 $27.78 $333
Data Storage $0.05 $1.50 $117
Data
Processing
$2.00 $60.00 $720
Covered Area 1km2 30km2 360km2
Total Cost ~$3 $90 $1170
* 3y amortization
Friedrichshain-
Kreuzberg:
20.16km2

26. 3D Mapping Berlin*
Refresh
Rate
Year Month Week Day
# Drones 3 30 128 892
Monthly
Cost
$270 $2.700 ~$12.000 ~$80.000
* Berlin: 892 km2;
Drone month: $90 / 30km2

27. … even more numbers
Quadrocopter Airplane Landsat 8
Acquisition $1.000 $300.000 $850.000.000
Operations $600
$150.000
(pilot + …)
$30.000.000
Amortization 3 years 15 years 30 years
Per Year $900 ~$170.000 ~$60.000.000
http://robohub.org/price-wars-counting-the-cost-of-drones-planes-and-satellites/
http://spacenews.com/40841nasa-official-a-landsat-8-clone-would-cost-more-than-650-million/

29. $19

30. $19
space for iPhone
baseboard

31. Some Consequences
• Trade very accurate, highly-priced gear with
super-inexpensive smartphone-scale chips
• $100 autonomous drones mapping cost
approaches $0, becomes a “Big Data’esk game”
• Data Acquisition Cost < Total Derivable Value
• Guiding questions: how stale may imagery data
be? What else can we do with it?

32. Historic Mapping Shift?
• Maps used to be power tools of the world,
for humans, by humans.
• Machine Vision for Autonomous Systems has
different maps needs
• Maps will be built for autonomous systems,
human-scale map only a side-effect

33. Open Questions
• At some point, drone manufacturers will truly
leverage smartphone market economics
• When will the first company deliver the autonomous
$100 drone with 8K+ video?
• How will legislation react to this?
• How will 100MP+ camera chips on $1000 drones
change the quality in the data collection game?
• OMG Privacy??

34. Summary
• Drones are quite cheap already. Economics works.
• Historic power shift in maps and maps’ users.
• Mapping cost will approach $0.
• 3D maps: machines & robots the primary user.

35. Thank you

36. Megapixels
0
4
8
12
16
2012 2013 2014 2015
iPhone Samsung Galaxy
Smartphone Cameras

37. Moore’s Law
• 2x transistor count every 1.5y
• translated into equiv speed up every generation
• Now Moore’s law works in “opposite direction”
• same performance, half the size every 1.5y
• 8 Core CPUs w/ less than 4Watt power draw
• Drones will become smaller & cheaper
keeping the overall performance level