How does it work? How does the drone ‘measure’?

With a drone you fly a pattern over the terrain and take pictures at a regular distance so that they overlap. The AiroCollect software uses a technology called photogrammetry to create a 2D and 3D model out of these images. The software will look in all the images for common features. Because these features are seen from different angles (because of the overlap of the images), the software can calculate the location of these points in 3 dimensions. This requires some computing power, which Airobot solved by performing these computations in the cloud.