That's super expensive. The majority of those costs are driven by the CapEx of the LiDAR unit. Ours is over $20k. In reality, though, it cost probably <$200 of operating expenses to collect that data.
The solution here is higher utilization of expensive LiDAR. So many pads, and few drones :D
Interesting! This is new to me. I know wind farm inspection is another really solid market (smaller land areas and high frequency - could be 1 pad for a whole farm), but I am not familiar with the rapid setup renewables. Can you share more?
Oh 100% - we think rail would be an excellent market. But as you've stated, they already have a thing moving around (the train) to take photos.
We see less delta in our service (but still something). There's certain perspectives only our aerial vantage point could capture, but we're too focused on power utilities right now to run that to ground just yet.
We're collecting 61MP RGB, LiDAR (DSM DTM) and radiometric thermal for sensors
We're thinking of flying at ~150' AGL or ~100' ATO at over 20 mph to collect data when automated. There's trade offs between effective speed, localized navigation, and mission planning. It's just challenging to build fully automated systems, but generally speaking flying higher and faster is more efficient and safer (also helps with command-and-control links)
Crawler drones are not a bad idea! They're just a bit slow and limiting. Also doesn't drive our long term plan (can't leave power lines)
It's also mechanically complex and there's many line & pole types that make it challenging to build for.
When we let go of distribution line charging, we considered this idea. Off some rough calcs we thought there would be lines that we'd get 'stuck' on so that was hard to overcome...
We don't need to keep the data - we'd rather sell it to other (qualified) folks to build useful tools on top of our data platform.
Think verifying hail claim insurance for farmers (no need to send a guy out there), or helping NOAA assist truck drivers with weather conditions on interstates etc. etc. (the list is very long)
Maybe we'll cover all that surface area ourselves, but that sounds pretty challenging.
A good proxy is satellite companies. They're typically just a API call for data, not full-stack collection + analysis.
For utilities, we'll probably stay vertical, so that we have our first 'application' to bring our data to market. We'll see.
Also - at scale we're excited to help build physical world models with our data. To be seen if this is something we'd do in-house.
We're super excited to help new startups build data that were never possible before with the extreme high cost of data collection :D