Business View - November 2015 131
$500,000 to $1.5 million.”
However, according to Antalovich, there are also some
new technologies coming into play that are actually less
expensive than their precedents and which may shake up
the aerial imagery industry in, as yet, unforeseen ways:
UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and drones. “The impact
that it’s going to have is unknown at this time,” he muses.
“Some of the smaller type projects that we do, covering
small sites, can be done, right now, with drones and UAVs.
The bigger sites? There just aren’t big enough systems at
this point that they could be done, cost-effectively. So, it
remains to be seen as to whether there will be larger type
systems that are unmanned. There are lots of issues that
have yet to be sorted out, but that’s one big possible game
changer in our field. And we’re going to be involved in that,
just from the standpoint that we’ve done this type of work.
So most of the companies that are in this field, including
ours, have already either purchased or developed their
own unmanned system, and everybody’s trying to figure
out how they’re going to use them.”
In fact, the company already has had a couple of inquiries
about using drones. Antalovich continues: “Some of them
are customers of ours who said, ‘Can you do our project
with an unmanned aircraft, and how is that going to bene-
fit us?’ And in many cases, the answer at this point is ‘No,’
because they have very large areas. You couldn’t possibly
- cost-effectively or time-effectively - take aerial images of
an entire county with a small unmanned aircraft. That’s
not going to work. But, there are other projects that we do
and some of our customers have approached us about
those where we’re just taking a photograph of a very small
site. And those are ones where we’ve actually given peo-
ple proposals to use an unmanned aircraft. One good ex-
ample is site surveys, such as a plant site. Another one is
for companies that have stockpiles of materials that they
use for manufacturing. Many times they’re kept outside. If
you take a photograph of those and you have stereo cov-
erage, which is typically what we have, you can make a
map of those and then compute the volume. That could
be done from an unmanned aircraft.
“Right now, though, everyone is trying to determine if
the quality will be commensurate with manned aircraft.
Drones can go lower and get closer to objects, which then
can be looked at from more angles than conventional
fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters can. But there are other
issues, such as vibration, and using a small format cam-
era because of weight limitations, meaning you have to
mosaic a lot of small pictures together. So, it’s just a brand-
new area. In the coming years, it will be determined where
it’s going to fit in. It’s definitely going to have its place but
it remains to be seen whether it’s going to be a niche area
or whether it’s going to take over a more significant part of
our business. And there’s going to be a lot of other compa-
nies getting involved because the capital expenditure us-
ing a drone is not very high, so they’ll be a lot of start-ups
MANUFACTURING
