
Learn the basics of land surveying with drones, including flight planning and processing imagery to create orthomosaics, digital surface models, contours, and 3d models.
Identify who this course serves, including drone enthusiasts, aspiring entrepreneurs, and land surveyors, and learn to start a drone surveying business with detailed surveying services as part of your offerings.
Identify land surveying as determining three-dimensional point positions and distances using gps, robotic total stations, and scanners, then draft plans with cad and gis software for engineering projects.
Advantages of using drones for Survey
For surveying, favor DJI Phantom 4 or Mavic Pro 2 due to best value and seamless integration with third-party flight planning and data processing software.
Ensure full equipment readiness for drone surveys by following a comprehensive preflight checklist: maintenance, batteries, cables, takeoff pad, safety gear, and essential apps (DJI Go, Drone Deploy, Litchi, GIS Essentials).
Select a take off point with at least a 5 meter radius of clear, unobstructed land near the flight plan center to optimize battery life and maintain signal.
Adjust on-site drone surveys by changing take-off points, altitude, and overlap (not below 70%) to handle obstacles and conserve battery, ensuring the survey completes.
Remove the drone's SD card, connect it to a laptop, and perform an image quality and coverage check for blurriness, overexposure, and missing areas, then upload to dronedeploy.
Identify when to return to home during a mid-flight drone survey, then continue flight after battery changes, using distance and remaining battery as guiding factors.
Explore pix4d, a photogrammetry software for generating orthomosaics, point clouds, 3d models, dsms, dtms, and contours. Learn desktop and cloud workflows, measurements, and system requirements for processing imagery.
Upload and process images; visualize and analyze outputs
Optimize processing options for your project
Process images, check quality reports, visualize and analyze outputs
practice with provided sample datasets to master processing drone imagery for land surveying and post-process with QGIS, AutoCAD, and Google Earth Pro to build client reports and a sustainable business.
This course is the first part of the 3 course series “The Ultimate Guide for Land Surveying with Drones”. This part covers the basics of land surveying and how drones have revolutionized this process. We have detailed all the steps involved in flight planning and execution and how you can go about processing the images captured to get the needed outputs. This course is especially useful for those of you who are beginners and have no experience with drone surveying.
The course series has over 6000 enrollments across 170 countries and it has been a bestselling course on Udemy.
Reviews
"Though the information about the workflow is exhaustive, it has been put in a very nice and concise way, I have started offering Drone Survey in my bouquet of services and today I got my first paying customer! Thanks."
"clear, descriptive, fun and generous teaching"
"Great content and easy to follow and understand. I think this is essential for anyone starting out with aerial mapping workflow."
"Good for beginners. Simple and easy to understand explanation which is very helpful for non technical people. I have learnt so much in under one hour!"
"The instrucor is very knowledgeable about drone mapping and it shows in the way he explains the entire workflow. I've really enjoyed the course!"