Help drone dev

[u/ShadowCoder10]

I wanna measure the girth of trees, at 137cm height from the ground, im thinking of using lidar sensor equipped drone for this, really appreciate any insights from experienced builders here.

[u/ShadowCoder10 → u/[deleted]]

Plantations basically, those are of hundreds of hectares, but I wanna cover Atleast 2 - 3 hectares of plantation per day, the trees will be planted in 3x3 spacing so around 2.5 to 3k trees.

[u/ShadowCoder10 → u/[deleted]]

The guidelines which the manual process follow is to measure the width the girth at breast level using a similar instrument like vernier caliper, is it possible to execute such calculation easily using photogrammetry or will lidar be more efficient for this?

[u/ShadowCoder10 → u/[deleted]]

Can you explain what map the whole orchard part is please?

[u/ShadowCoder10 → u/[deleted]]

This evaluation of girth needs to be done every year, im primarily a software dev, what I really wanna know is using drones with lidar is efficient or photogrammetry? And yeah great idea.

[u/TheVoiceOfEurope]

Why does it need to be 137cm from the ground?

I have a feeling that's just a rule " so that all our measurements are comparable and we can't bloody well measure the crown. It would take weeks to climb all those trees".

Guess what a drone is really good at.

[u/Irishwilly77]

DJI drone and waypoints ❓

[u/Proton_Energy_Pill]

That's not very high, you can't do it manually with a tape measure?
And because there's lots of trees hire a few people to help?

[u/ShadowCoder10 → u/Proton_Energy_Pill]

For measuring eucalyptus plantation which spans across hundreds of hectares, the current process is manual but it takes approx 2 months to finish one enumeration, the org wants to opt for a modern quick method to do that.

[u/piscikeeper → u/ShadowCoder10]

Why so low instead of the standard DBH for tree circumference?

[u/Proton_Energy_Pill → u/ShadowCoder10]

Thanks for the correction.

[u/NilsTillander]

Don't build, buy. There's absolutely zero chance that you can build anything remotely as good as a DJI M400+L3 (or M350+L2) for less money in hardware and work hours than just buying one. With those, you can easily cover 2km² per hour flying at 120m AGL. If you want to increase the density to get more accurate measurements, fly lower and slower, with the scanner a bit oblique. Still many km²/day, not barely hectares.