3DR, the creators of Site Scan, announced recently it has entered into a partnership with Esri, to develop Site Scan Esri Edition, a customized version of its full end-to-end Site Scan product. Esri product manager for Drone2Map for ArcGIS and Full Motion Video Cody Benkelman spoke with GISCafe Voice about the upcoming development and the Site Scan Esri Edition.

“Site Scan Esri Edition is an app focused exclusively on providing flight planning,” said Benkelman. “something Esri does not provide, and our customers have been requesting.”

The Esri Site Scan Edition app is designed to be used with Esri’s Drone2Map for ArcGIS software for post processing in ArcGIS, and full drone project mission planning for transferring drone captured data into the Esri ArcGIS ecosystem. There is also drone processing capability within ArcGIS Pro called “orthomapping.” Users of Site Scan Esri Edition will also be able to process data in ArcGIS Pro through the orthomapping workflow.

Site Scan Esri Edition will allow you to do the flight planning and it will connect directly to ArcGIS Online, and can work well for the enterprise user as many organizations already have a lot of their own data available on ArcGIS Online.

“They’ll have their own field boundaries, site boundaries, vectors along power lines or other linear features, and much of that data will already be accessible on ArcGIS Online,” said Benkelman. “Site Scan Esri Edition will allow those users to connect directly to ArcGIS Online via the internet. They can drop ArcGIS Online layers directly into the flight planning process.”

Benkelman said that Site Scan Esri Edition is good for both enterprise users or those who are only using a drone once or twice a year. Through ArcGIS Online you have access to a vast amount of existing data, such as the USDA NAIP imagery, Landsat and Sentinel 2 imagery, FAA flight maps, weather data, worldwide terrain data, etc. Users can also access custom data layers from the user’s FedRAMP authorized ArcGIS Online organization account as base and reference data for their drone flight planning mission.

In contrast, “Many ArcGIS users worldwide are increasing their use of the Site Scan existing product as ArcGIS is the end destination for a lot of drone data, so even if they’re using different drone hardware or different flight planning applications, a lot of that data ends up in ArcGIS Online or behind an organization’s firewall as proprietary data.”

(more…)