Automating Drone Data Acquisition
Blog post
Arboair is a longtime partner of GLOBHE. Together with Arboair, we work on digitalizing the forest industry and bring more automation, scalability, and digitalization to one of the oldest industries in Europe. With spruce bark beetles ravaging our forests, the risk of wildfires that can erupt anytime, and deforestation, it is becoming more urgent to act quickly and take action. That’s why digitizing this industry is becoming the main goal for governments and private companies that no longer can afford to lose time.
The solution of Arboair uses AI-driven image analysis to produce sharp decision-making data for forest owners. They use the most advanced technology to achieve high precision and work to create the conditions for a long-term improvement of forest management. The platform requires geospatial and earth observation data to be quickly analyzed for this to be successful.
The role of GLOBHE in this partnership is to provide the data that Arboair’s AI will analyze. Before GLOBHE, Arboair used satellite imagery or struggled to find suitable pilots to capture the data. The satellite imagery was not providing enough resolution to allow the AI to identify tree species and infected trees, and in many cases, the data was costly. With our crowd of local drone operators, we quickly sent the closest qualified operators to capture the high-resolution EO imagery for a lower price than satellites.
By using GLOBHE, Arboair could get very high-resolution images at the cm scale. The closest available alternative was 30 cm resolution satellite images that were both more expensive and less efficient.
“The reason why we chose to work with GLOBHE is the flexibility, speed, and extensive geographical coverage. With Crowddroning, our customers can quickly and flexibly get the data they need when they lack access to a drone for data collection,” says Jakob Hjalmarsson, COO of Arboair.
To automate this solution even further, we have developed our own API which our clients, including Arboair, are using to request data and fetch imagery at scale. Our API allows the client to order data through their own web app. They can order data, check its status, modify orders, and delete orders without even visiting GLOBHE’s website and staying completely in their app. By doing so, they are able to place unlimited orders and fetch the images directly to their servers. Without this API, the clients have to place each order manually in GLOBHE’s web app, get a download link of the images, download the images, sort them, and then upload them to their servers. This would take hours!
The benefit of using an API is that the client will gain valuable hours, if not days, of work by avoiding downloading and uploading data. The client will focus only on what is important, and that is getting all the insights they need from the data that is now ready for analysis. Therefore, the clients are winning time while avoiding the stress and frustration of doing all the previous steps manually. And all that needs to do is an API key from GLOBHE and a couple of code lines that the client will write in their app to allow for this integration.
