Releases

Product Release Wrap-Up April 2020

April 22, 2020

DroneDeploy’s Spring Release comes at an uncertain time for much of the world. With countless businesses put on hold, and billions of people maintaining physical distance, now, more than ever, we are reminded of the importance of communication, flexibility, and virtual engagement. At DroneDeploy, we plan to continue to enhance our product and services to provide you with the solutions you need to operate effectively in any working condition.

Our customers have told us that drone inspections are an integral part of their workflow and that they needed a platform that could scale within the organization and connect with critical internal systems. With this release, we’re excited to announce key pieces of functionality to continue to address those priorities with enhancements to flight, uploads, inspections workflow, integrations, and more.

DroneDeploy Live Stream

Get Real-Time Views of your Location, Improving Response Times, and Situational Awareness

Now with the DroneDeploy Live Stream (beta), you don’t need to be on the scene to address a critical issue or respond to an emergency. Live Stream allows pilots to provide a real-time video stream to decision-makers or response teams who are involved with the situation at hand.

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Anyone who is first on the scene can launch a DroneDeploy Mission, enable a Live Stream, then send a link to view to any other users who have access to that project. This facilitates quick issue identification, collaboration, and can speed up response times for site emergencies.

DroneDeploy Live Stream allows you to conduct drone live streaming

If you work in the safety and compliance department for a utility company, Live Stream is particularly valuable for assessing damage to critical infrastructure after a natural disaster. Launch the drone to inspect for damage after tornadoes or floods, and enable Live Stream to broadcast the data to additional personnel or departments.

Available for Enterprise Accounts Only. Interested to learn more? Please Contact Us

DroneDeploy Mission

Complete Multiple Objectives in One Mission - Saving Time On-Site

DroneDeploy Mission is one of our most significant enhancements to the flight experience yet, intended to save you time on-site by making flights and data uploads as easy as possible. With DroneDeploy Mission, you can link your objectives so flights can go entirely uninterrupted. From panoramas to video to maps, sequence all of your operations, all in one flight.

Entirely prepare your DroneDeploy Mission before the drone ever takes off, hugely improving the efficiency of the drone’s time in the air and saving battery life. Additionally, while the drone is in flight, you can continue to chain additional plans to the originally planned Mission. Designed with the utmost flexibility, you can pause a Mission if necessary to capture additional pieces of data with Manual Flight, then resume the Mission where you left off.

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Once you’ve captured your datasets, you can upload them all at once from your mobile device. Not only does this remove the need for an SD card in many instances, but you’ll also no longer need to parse through hundreds of photos to determine which plan they belong to – drastically improving your workflow.

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It’s never been easier to capture all media assets in one flight. Before getting on-site, you can create your flight plan templates, then add them all to be completed in the Mission. During the flight, if you decide you need new media types, you can easily add a new plan, like a video plan, to capture a specific area of the site. If you need to get a closer look at an asset during a planned flight, you can pause the flight, inspect the asset using manual mode, then resume where you left off. All of these different media types can be uploaded on your mobile device using background processing, meaning you can kick off processing while you’re on your way back to the office.

Available for all account types. Upload only available for paid accounts. Interested to learn more? Please Contact Us

Advanced Thermal Control

Thermal and RGB Views Help Detect Issues While Flying

We are releasing Advanced Thermal Control to facilitate more flexibility while conducting inspections with dual RGB and thermal cameras. Start your DroneDeploy Mission in your preferred method of capture, then easily toggle between RGB and thermal while flying to inspect assets or highlight issues that one camera might not easily see.

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Manual Flight is Available for All Accounts - Thermal Live Map is Only Available for Enterprise Accounts

2D Inspections

Save Time, Decrease Costs, and Increase Safety with Remote Inspections

Inspections play a critical role in many industries for quality assurance, regulatory compliance, and safety, but the inspection itself can be tedious and risky. Now, teams can conduct virtual inspections on 2D maps from the safety of the office and collaborate no matter where they’re working.

The location of each photo on the map will be displayed, making it easy to scroll and select the photo for the area or asset you’d like to inspect. Track issues from identification to resolution with issue summaries, statuses, and @mentions to ensure facilities are safe, assets are in the right place, and stakeholders have all relevant project information.

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The 2D inspection workflow is particularly well suited for tower, asset, or facade inspections. It allows users to scroll through the series of photos around the area of interest, select the appropriate photo, then conduct the remote inspection using issue labels, summaries, and @mentions to collaborate with additional team members.

Available for Business & Enterprise Accounts

Org-Level Exports & Source Image Exports

Improve Workflows and Data Accessibility

DroneDeploy users are now able to automatically export every single project within their organization’s DroneDeploy account. Setting automatic exports saves time by removing the need to manually export your maps onto your computer or a 3rd party software. With a single click, you can ensure colleagues have access to the most up to date site information where and when they need it, saving time and money and preventing miscommunication.

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You’ll also be able to export all of the source imagery associated with a project. Store or re-upload these images wherever they might be needed.

Available for Enterprise Accounts Only

Esri Integration (beta)

Save Time and Increase Visibility by Accessing all DroneDeploy Maps in ArcGIS

For many industries working with GIS, Esri is a vital tool. Now, DroneDeploy will automatically serve all of your organization’s maps to your ArcGIS Online or Pro account. Having the latest high-resolution DroneDeploy map alongside datasets housed in ArcGIS is a valuable tool for you and the rest of your team to conduct critical geographic analysis.

This is particularly useful if you’re in the oil & gas industry. When prepping or decommissioning a drill site, it’s essential to have all pieces of the project’s geographic data housed in a single central repository like ArcGIS. This integration facilitates site-safety, documentation, and visibility for all stakeholders by ensuring the most up-to-date DroneDeploy maps are available within your Esri instance.

Available for Enterprise Accounts Only (Add-On Cost) - please speak with your account manager to discuss pricing or Contact Us to learn more

Agriculture-Specific Onboarding

Gain Value Quickly with Agriculture-Specific Workflows and Tools

As agriculture professionals begin to plant this spring, we wanted to make it easier for new DroneDeploy users to become familiar with the platform and recognize value more quickly in their early-season drone maps.

Agriculture On-Boarding with DroneDeploy

Every new agriculture user will receive a set of example maps tailored to their specific use cases, highlighting patterns and issues that can be identified using drone data.

Available for All Account Types

Spring Product Release Webinar

Join us on May 6, 2020, at 10 am PST to hear from the DroneDeploy team on the latest release. We will go into more detail on how you can leverage these new capabilities to advance your drone program and better analyze your data. We will be hosting the webinar through the DroneDeploy Academy, so make sure to register for the Academy not just to gain access to this webinar, but also all of the training and best practices from DroneDeploy.  

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