Unmanned aerial vehicle
surveys will need the best in
big data management
PHOTO
www.raima.com
Today’s UAVs are small, simple and
cheap to operate, and can carry
multiple types of surveying equipment.
They allow survey data to be collected
in a continuous stream throughout
the flight and instantly uploaded to a
server for immediate analysis.
battlefield monitoring, filming, crowd
control, traffic management, assessing
the condition of buildings, metrological
forecasting, geological surveys,
flood management, etc. The big data
solutions developed for agriculture will
transfer directly into these fields.
U
nmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) are making surveying
of landscapes, buildings,
etc. so much easier and
more cost-effective that it is inevitable
that there will be an explosion in
this activity. This will create massive
amounts of data that will need to
be managed and stored efficiently,
as Steinar Sande, CEO of Raima, a
leading provider of high-performance,
always-on database management
systems, explores.
The vast North American prairies have
been producing grain crops in global
volumes for many decades. They
helped feed America and Canada as
they grew, and generate large amounts
of foreign revenues from the export
markets.
From the 1960s onward, aerial and
even satellite photography of the
fields have helped drive efficiency into
planting, irrigation and harvesting.
However, such surveys were difficult
and expensive to execute and the
results were often crude.
Not surprisingly then, the advent of the
modern UAV has moved agricultural
surveying onto an entirely new plane.
Today’s UAVs are small, simple and
cheap to operate, and can carry
multiple types of surveying equipment.
They allow survey data to be collected
in a continuous stream throughout
the flight and instantly uploaded
to a server for immediate analysis.
Where previously aerial surveys were
occasional and crude, now they can be
12
PECM Issue 14
frequent and detailed!
Farmers are now talking about moving
into an era of ‘precision agriculture’,
which luckily ties in with economists’
predictions that worldwide population
growth over the next two generations
will mean that food production will
have to at least double. UAV surveys
will play an important role in ensuring
the necessary increase in productivity.
As well as conventional cameras,
the survey UAVs can carry specialist
equipment such as ultraviolet, infrared
and thermal imaging cameras,
hyperspectral sensors and lidar
scanners. (Hyperspectral sensors
provide ‘big picture’ or wide-view
information to typically 10mm
resolution. Lidar is a cross between
lasers and radar which automatically
focuses on planted areas and scans
them with up to 500,000 laser pulses
per second to collect ultra-high
resolution data.) These data streams
will have to be accurately married
with GPS (global positioning systems)
and other information for complete
analysis.
It is inevitable that farmers will want
their surveys to provide instant
information, so the survey data will
have to upload instantly to the cloud,
be processed, then downloaded - to
both mobile devices in the field and to
a central computer in the farm office.
Transferable technology
Many other industries are also adopting
UAVs for security surveillance,
Much of the hardware necessary for
this sort of blanket surveying is already
available at near-commodity prices.
But for precision agriculture and other
professional uses, data quality and
post-processing are critical, and this
is a specialist role for dedicated data
services providers.
With its RDM (Raima Database
Manager) embedded data management
technology, Raima already has a
proven track record in big data
applications across many industries. Its
solutions offer specialised capabilities
that enable intuitive management and
manipulation of real-time information.
RDM is optimised for embedded,
real-time, in memory and mobile
applications, delivering flexible and
reliable solutions for collecting and
storing large volumes of data. It
provides intuitive and efficient methods
for managing and navigating through
information quickly.
The product has a highly modular
structure, so that only the components
that you really need are included in
your embedded application. As well as
multiple APIs, RDM includes developer
tools to help you manage databases on
an embedded platform, and these tools
can also be built into your application
if desired.
There is no doubt that in future, data
– and the information and knowledge
that can be drawn from that data
– will be one of the greatest assets
available to farmers. Raima’s RDM
data management technology offers
agriculture the tools needed to achieve
greater productivity and to be better
able to react to changing market
requirements.