It seems the team at DroneDeploy is skipping their summer vacations this year — or at least they’re just squeezing a lot of work into the mix. The company dropped a whole bunch of new features and support options in a slew of product launches this summer. Perhaps among the most compelling of the product launches from DroneDeploy is DJI Air 2S support, bringing far greater usability to the popular, portable drone from DJI.
DroneDeploy is a San Francisco-based company known for its mapping software. And while it primarily builds software for drones, it has since expanded to other sorts of robotics, which have taken on a solid chunk of the updates. DroneDeploy released a blog post outlining every single new product in great detail, which you can check out here. But here are some of the highlights of the product launches from DroneDeploy — and what they mean in the broader context of the drone industry:
DroneDeploy support for DJI Air 2S
For DJI drone pilots, perhaps the most exciting July product drop from DroneDeploy is the newly-added full Flight App support (iOS) for the DJI Air 2S.
The DJI Air 2S is one of the best drones out there both for photographers and certain types of business owners. It has impressive specs, including 8 GB of internal storage, 31-minute flight time and 12 km range. It especially stands out for its 1” sensor offering 20-megapixel photos and 5.4K video.
Yet perhaps even more impressive is its $999 price tag, making it an affordable option particularly for small businesses.
Now that DroneDeploy supports the iOS Flight App for DJI Air 2S, this latest product makes the DJI Air 2S a viable drone for an entirely new set of small businesses (the support is a built-in partnership via the Dronelink SDK).
Smart Uploader
While still in beta mode, DroneDeploy’s new tool, Smart Uploader, tackles one of the biggest challenges reported by drone pilots: organizing data. While perhaps years ago, gathering data felt like a challenge, drones have made data-gathering easy. With all this data, the challenges these days is sorting the data. And DroneDeploy claims to have created an industry first: Smart Uploader.
The new Smart Uploader tool takes your complete set of aerial data (even if it was taken during multiple flight plans) and automatically sorts it into the appropriate media categories for upload and processing in DroneDeploy.
And with it, there’s theoretically no need to manually sort imagery into categories such as map plans, panos, videos or photo plans.
360 Panos and BIM Compare for Walkthrough
One of the biggest pivots for DroneDeploy was the addition of Walkthrough, which adds ground-based functionality to the software’s offerings, in theory far expanding the reach of DroneDeploy software beyond simply drones. 360 Walkthrough launched back in 2020 to function with both aerial and any on-the-ground 360-cameras (hand-held or robotic) to provide comprehensive digital reconstruction of any job site. It’s been used by prominent companies including Boston Dynamics, which is famous for its creepy cool parkour robot.
This month, DroneDeploy added a new ground-based 360 Panos feature which — just like it sounds like — makes it easier for field crews to quickly capture high-resolution 360 images. Once images are taken, they’re located and tagged to a map, design plan, or level, and then are automatically uploaded for teams to review them from anywhere in the world.
And how’s this for a new 3D experience? DroneDeploy also added a beta BIM Compare feature, which uses software to automatically provide insights into how a project is progressing visually, making it possible to identify issues and clash detections, and validate installation according to design.
In that same vein, DroneDeploy has a new partnership with Insta360. While not yet available, DroneDeploy said that it soon expects to support the Insta360 One RS 1-inch.
The emphasis this product puts on non-aerial robots corroborates a growing trend as of late where drone companies make robots besides flying ones.
Summer 2022 product launches from DroneDeploy
Those are some of the most game-changing product launches from DroneDeploy this summer, but it’s far from a complete list. Other updates including Spanish and Portuguese language support, new custom flight logs and more. Read all about DroneDeploy’s summer 2022 product releases here.
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