ydqa ep16

John Dickow: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to another episode of Your Drone Questions Answered. I'm John Dicko here to answer your drone questions or find the person who can.

And today that person is Ted Strazimiri. He's the founder at Sky Deploy U A s. Ted, thanks for

Ted Strazimiri: joining me today. thanks for having me, John.

John Dickow: Today we're gonna answer the question, what are cut and fill calculations and how do you do them? So mm-hmm. Let's just start by you introducing yourself.

Tell me a little bit what you do at Sky Deloy. What Sky Deloy is, particularly how it relates to this question about cut and fill calculations.

Ted Strazimiri: Yeah, well, sky Deloy is a drone service provider, and that's what I envisioned. this business that I started in 2017 to be up until now, and for the most part, that's played out.

I was looking through, you know, the, the drones that were available in 2017. I always had a passion for photography and aviation and, um, you know, I, I grew up on computers and I, I loved all of the aspects of those three things coming together. And when I first saw drones [00:01:00] being used for work rather than, you know, just for videos, that type of stuff, I really fell in love with that concept.

And I decided to start Sky Deloy, but I didn't have any training. I, I don't. Have a, a background in surveying or anything like that? I actually studied economics in, in university, so, uh, I can do math, but probably not the same type of math that you need to do when you're doing cut bill calc. But the, the nice thing is that there's a lot of resources out there and, um, you know, if you're good at using those resources, uh, you can vary.

Effectively teach yourself, how to do this stuff. And, as long as you're, you know, you're aware of what you can and shouldn't do, then you can eventually build up that experience. And that's kind of what I've done over the last six years is just build up that experience by. Starting the business and then going out and, and doing this work.

and I always focused on trying to get the work instead of making money. because I, I always thought that it was much more important to put that experience under my [00:02:00] belt than to quickly pay off that equipment that I, that I purchased. So I'm here now, and now my big thing is really just working with that data.

I find it, uh, to be where most of that value is created. Drones are becoming easier and easier to fly every day, and they're becoming more and more capable. but the data is ultimately that bottleneck of making something that someone is willing to pay for or something that is gonna help someone in their regular activities.

And, and that's what I really love to do and that's what I focus on the most today. Cool. Well,

John Dickow: I mean, gimme an example about, like a purpose somebody might be coming to Sky Deploy and what, what they would need that data for and how you might collect it.

Ted Strazimiri: Well, it's, you have to be very flexible because drones are a tool.

Um, they offer a unique perspective, and that perspective can be applied to a lot of problems. at the end of the day, the sensors may be very different, you know, but it's just, it's, it's like flying camera and. [00:03:00] What we can do, even just with regular cameras is pretty amazing. so I have, uh, clients that I, that I work with now that started off essentially just asking me, Hey, can you count how many cars are in this parking lot?

and. I've developed that specialty and that sort of use case. I have people that reach out and ask me to figure out how much, uh, sand or or rocks are in that pile. And that's volume calculations, of course. And it's, it's the same tools. The data collection is basically the same, but the deliverable is different.

Inspections are something that I really, specialize in as well. And they all have their, you know, Skill set that's required, but at the end of the day, One part is data collection, the other part is the, you know, what you do with that data or the post-processing. so it really varies.

And, and cut fill is, is no different in, in that, in that regard. The volumetric, uh, estimations.

John Dickow: Okay. Well, great. Well, let's dive into kinda the question itself here. And first, let's answer what are cut and fill [00:04:00] calculations. If you can just answer that

Ted Strazimiri: in a nutshell. Yeah, well, I had no idea what these were until I started, really diving into the photogrammetry world.

one of the pieces of software that I was first, introduced to, or I first saw was PIX 40 D, uh, mapper, which has been around for a long time. And I actually teach Pix 40 d uh, in a college, one of my college courses that I, that I currently am doing right now. And I've been teaching it for the last five years.

And, This software's been around for a while, but it's extremely capable. But it's just a class of software, right? It it does. A point cloud. And then from that point cloud we can extract measurements. And one of those measurements is volume. So cut represents a volume that you can think of as a pile, right?

And we want to know how much is above a certain level, So we call that level a base plane, for example. That could be one, there's a lot of terminology in this world, but think of it as just a surface or uh, you know, where that knife slices through that pile. And [00:05:00] everything above that level is your cut think about it like a cake. You're cutting that slice of cake off and you're interested in knowing how much cake is in that slice. fill is the opposite. So that level now we're looking at how much does it take, how much volume or material would it take to fill this? This hole or this depression to get to that level.

So cut is generally in removing material and fill is in backfilling, an area with.

John Dickow: Great, great explanation there. And that's especially useful for me. I, before we received this question from our audience, I was like, I have no idea what cut and fill calculations are. I had to look it up myself and actually your explanation is even simpler from what I was finding online.

So let's get into how you do them. I'm assuming there's obviously probably more than one way, but let's talk about your experience and what you do. How do you do cut and fill calculations?

Ted Strazimiri: So let's think about how cut fill calculations are done before the age of [00:06:00] drones, or I mean, are still done by the vast majority of people that are, are looking for.

Generally, you know, the simplest way of doing that is to, you have a a, an excavator, you just scoop, you take a scoop out, and then you know how much volume is in that scoop, and you keep doing until that, that area is, is gone. A step up from there would be to use surveying equipment. So for example, the, the cut, the pile, uh, of material, and you're trying to look up that volume.

What is, what someone with surveying equipment like a, like a rtk. GPS receiver on a pole, right? If you've ever seen a surveyor with that pole and there's this little thing on top, and they're just walking around looking at a screen that's attached to that pole, generally what they're doing is they're using high accuracy G ps to figure out the position of the point at the end of that pole, right?

That right where the the pointy bit is. a surveyor could take that poll and then walk. Every yard or every five yards or every 10 yards and collect one of those points. And that's how they would do, [00:07:00] a cut fill calculation as well. You basically walk all over that pile to the top side. It's kind of dangerous.

and you collect these points. You take these points, you put them into CAD software like civil, 3d. You generate a surface, which essentially is like throwing a blanket all, all over these points and it draping over where all those points are and that surface, right? You can think of it as like a 3D model or rough 3D model.

That surface represents roughly where that material would be. In that real world, thanks to those GPS coordinates, and then you would use the software to say, here's the base. Calculate the volume, above that base. So that's like the traditional way of doing it. Drones doing it is essentially the exact same thing, except instead of collecting those points manually with that survey poll and having to walk to do it and to collect them and, you know, It can depend on how often you collect them.

With a survey pole, you can do it once every 10 yards or once a yard, or once every, you know, five [00:08:00] inches. The drone can do that through photogrammetry, essentially the exact same way. The drone knows its position. It takes pictures that are overlapping, those pictures are turned into that surface that we would be using with AutoCAD again.

And then we do the same exact calculation. So it's just a matter of how the data is collected, how we get to the actual volume. It's the same, it's just like calculating volume for any shape, inside of that shape. So photogrammetry is like really the key here. And understanding photogrammetry is so that you can generate those points on that surface, on that, on that pile.

The, the key differentiator between the two is that what's photogrammetry you can generate. Hundreds of thousands of points per square yard, Or, Just any area that you give, you can, you can generate so many points. Generally, way more than you need and way more than you can do manually on foot collecting with those, uh, with, so, The accuracy or the precision can also be better [00:09:00] because you're now seeing every little undulation on that surface and you're able to calculate the volume with that in mind.

But most of the time, I mean, you don't need that type of precision cuz there's a little bit of air Anyways, so it's. Essentially a much, much faster way of doing it. The old traditional method, but still requires points on the ground somewhere. It's just those points are coming from the drone and those images that you collected.

John Dickow: Okay. Now, is this very reliant, I mean, in terms of how you're doing them ways to do this with your drone, is this very software reliant? Is this something that you would be getting through a software within the drone or the drone itself? No,

Ted Strazimiri: it's, so generally none of this happens on the drone. The drone is just your flying camera.

You, you, you do need images. So your first input would be those images. Now, there's a few rules of thumb about those images. Of course, they have to be sharp. and you can't do this on something that, for example, is, uh, a very, homogenous texture. It doesn't have any features in it. Like, let's imagine like a [00:10:00] big pile of like.

Salt, like beautiful white salt. It wouldn't work on something like that because those images that you're feeding into the software, and I'll talk about the software afterwards, but those source images, the fieldwork, what the software is doing on those images is picking out certain features. So we're identifying, you know, little rocks, et cetera, and it's matching them across all these images you take.

So you have to capture sharp images. And you also have to capture these images with overlap. So that means that in one shot you have, you know, the pile or a section of the pile and the shot that you take preceding it. should have about 70% of what you saw in that first shot. You should have that in the second shot as well.

So we call that overlap, and generally the rule of thumb is somewhere around 70% when you do this over and over again, and you cover the entire area of that pile with these overlapping images. You have the images you need to then put into photogrammetry and photogrammetry. There's a variety of software I mentioned one earlier, Pix 40 [00:11:00] Mapper, so that in ingests those images and then creates a 3D model from them.

But there's others, there's other tools out there. There's free ones as well. There's web. O D M is is a great one. So ODM stands for Open Drone Map. I believe it's like $50. Or free if you know how to install it and you're good with, you know, a little bit of scripting, you can install it for free. If you wanna pay $50 in support to developers, they made a nice little package that installs it on your computer and you can run it through that.

but there's, there's a lot of different. Tools, but ultimately they're all photogrammetry softwares, right? They're all just ingesting images and creating 3D models from those images. Some of those also have in-built tools to just draw an area and get the cut or fill, cut calculation directly within that tool.

So Pix, word mapper is one that does that. DroneDeploy is another one that does that. DroneDeploy is just a website you up, you upload the images there. Mm-hmm. They process it on their computers and you get the results and you can do that measurement. and then there's also other ways where you [00:12:00] can maybe create that model with odm.

Which doesn't have that tool for measurement, I believe. I haven't seen it in a while, but I don't think it's there. And then you can take that, and then you can upload it to another software that allows you to just to view it and to measure and to make these calculations within it. And a good example of that is a software called nera, and it's nera.app is the website.

But really all that does is it just takes these, this model you created from the software and it displays it on your screen. Through a browser, and then you can make those measurements right in that browser. You can even share it with others so they can make their own measurements. So it's kind of like three steps, I would say.

It's collect the data, turn images into 3D models, and then measure the 3D model, how you do that combination of actual, specific hardware. But many of them exist and it's actually very, very straightforward to do that. Great.

John Dickow: I mean, that is very well explained on your part. thank you for somebody who knew very little about this, uh, such as myself.

I like to always ask this question as we get towards the end of the interview is, you know, [00:13:00] advice, that you can give our listeners, our viewers, and in your case, you're somebody who, you know, has built. a company, from doing this kind of work, and I, I know a lot of our, our listeners, our viewers, are always kind of trying to pursue, some of their own ventures.

And so what, what advice would you have for somebody who's kind of looking to do work off a drone, even kind of data collection kind of work as you've,

Ted Strazimiri: as you've built? Mm-hmm. you know, I get a lot of requests and questions from people, in my messages, and they're, they're asking, Hey, Ted, how do I learn this?

How do I do this? Quite honestly, the only way to learn it, like really learn it is to go out and try it. So my number one recommendation is, first of all, get. Any drone. It doesn't have to be something with rtk. It doesn't have to be your, you know, M 300 enterprise. It doesn't have to be fancy. Like I, you know, it's very easy to spend a lot of money on these toys, but literally anything that takes a picture can be used, uh, for.

I'd say like 90% of the work that I've done is just picture based, right? [00:14:00] So go get yourself a simple drone, something affordable that you'll, you'll be able to, you know, use for a while, something like a Mavic Mini or even a Mave Mini three if you wanna spend a little bit more. Perfectly capable of doing this stuff.

And then take that drone and, get the videos, get the photos, get that outta your system. But if you're actually serious about, you know, doing something that maybe can turn into a business down the road, start practicing data collection for photogrammetry. So start taking pictures that are overlapping.

You can do it of a building, you can do it of a tree of a car. Of a, a pile of dirt. It doesn't matter. Just practice moving the drone a little bit, taking a picture, move the drone a little bit, take a picture, do that over and over again, and take those pictures that you did, that you took and put them into some of these softwares that I mentioned and see what the results are.

And then from that iteration, you'll understand how the software and how all of this works and what you need to change next time to get a better result. That's literally the only way to really deeply [00:15:00] get good at this. You can take courses, you can take, you know, webinars. You can pay for these things very quickly, spend a lot of money, but ultimately you gotta go out there and do the work and.

You don't need fancy equipment to do this type of work. You just need a drone, or even your phone camera can do it. Honestly, just you're doing it from a lower altitude, of course, but it's just pictures, right? So get out there, do it, practice, and then you'll get better. But it takes time and it takes like a real passion for it.

You have to be really into it. And I was like, I couldn't stop thinking about this. I still can't. this type of stuff is always on my mind. and eventually you'll see. The opportunities appear and you'll be like, Hey, I can probably use photogrammetry for this, or I could probably do it this way using my drone, because I've seen all of those use cases pop up in, in when I was trying.

And so like in the beginning, I, I really did not focus on making money. I focused on getting as much hands-on experience in the use cases. That may present itself. And [00:16:00] whenever, uh, when I did start the company, when a use case presented itself, I was laser focused on just getting the job. and you're not gonna get rich quick.

So get the job, get the practice, and then grow from there. Uh, but you ultimately do have to invest some time, uh, more than anything to get to that point. Okay.

John Dickow: Well, I, I really appreciate that answer, especially, and I know our audience really appreciates it. Well, I mean, and just coming on here and explaining all this to us, the, college instructor really came out, I think in this interview.

you've definitely done this before, so thank you. Is there anything else? I'd like to just give you an opportunity to say anything else, um, that I might've missed, maybe I didn't elicit in my questions.

Ted Strazimiri: Well, I mean, there's a lot we could sit here and talk for the next three hours and I would love that.

but ultimately, there's a great community out there of people that are willing to share this kind of information. I'm really active on LinkedIn. so for those of you that maybe want to follow my work, Connect or follow me on LinkedIn is just my, my name, of course. and I, I like to post,[00:17:00] original content.

Like I only post things that I do, and I like to post an explanation of maybe the application of what I'm doing, not just like a cool, you know, video or cool reel, but like why this is important and why people are using drones for this and, and maybe how I got to that. Um, I'm an entrepreneur myself.

I always think about like, you know, is this making people money? Like, are, is this sustainable? Is it more than just a gimmick? So I'm brutally honest where things kind of seem a little too good to be true. Uh, yeah, because we're, you know, we're always being sold things in this industry and it's very easy to go down that rabbit hole.

So, following me there, but there's a lot of other people on LinkedIn, on YouTube, especially. That are just constantly sharing this knowledge. You just have to go out and get it. it's a pretty unique opportunity. Awesome.

John Dickow: Well, Ted, I appreciate you coming on, really, really good information here.

Uh, we'd love to have you back on again when the, we get another question, maybe related to data collection. Ted Reza, he's the founder of Sky Deploy ua. S Thank you again, Ted. I really appreciate it. And in the meantime, you can [00:18:00] submit your own drone questions. we'll find an answer for those, uh, the best we can, or the person who can.

you can submit those questions@ydqa.io. We'll do our best. In the meantime, we'll see you in the sky.