All posts by Jeff Salmon
Whole Lotta Droning Going On: Commercial UAV Expo: Part 2
Continuing with my look at last month’s Commercial UAV Expo, here’s more cool UAV-related gear. Thermal Imaging Drone Parrot is known mostly for being a provider of consumer-level drones (full disclosure, I have three of them). Now they are moving into the commercial market. One example is the Parrot Bebop-Pro Thermal. This quadcopter includes two...
Cool Gear at the Commercial UAV Expo: Part 1
The third Commercial UAV Expo brought together 2,000 professionals from 53 countries and every U.S. state, representing a wide array of industries, all in sunny Las Vegas where the October weather was quite agreeable. The event featured four keynotes, three plenaries, dozens of industry-specific presentations, offsite flying demonstrations, numerous networking events, and more than 150...
Space Colonization: Why Titan Is Better than Mars
Come with me on a flight of fact-based science fiction. It’s 2024 and you’re strapped into SpaceX’s BFR (Big Falcon Rocket). Destination? Mars! You’ve sold your home and bought a one-way ticket to the red planet. Your heart pounds as the countdown commences. Whoosh and you’re off. Six months later, you disembark and board a...
The (Android) Empire Strikes Back: Mainstreaming Augmented Reality, Part 2
Let’s pick up the AR thread again and look at what the Android platform has to offer in augmented reality (AR). It was just a matter of days after Apple rolled out its ARKit SDK (software development kit) when Google followed suit with its ARCore SDK. ARCore is built on Tango technology but expands the...
Drone Coding: Fun, Future, and Fundamentals
For Surveying’s Next Generation Attracting the next generation of surveyors is a perennial topic in the geospatial profession. I’d like to suggest adding K-12 UAS coding programs to the list of outreach efforts. The sooner students become interested in the geospatial field, the greater the success of attracting them to the profession. It is widely...
Geospatial to the Rescue
In view of recent weather-related events, we’ll take a quick detour from our series on AR (augmented reality) to cover RR (real reality): the catastrophic 2017 hurricane and wildfire season. The Caribbean islands, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas are reeling from the effects of hurricanes Harvey and Irma. As of this writing, Jose is only brushing...
