LIDAR drone for surveying and mapping
High-quality LIDAR data for terrain, vegetation, and infrastructure
A LIDAR drone that helps you finish fieldwork faster
A simpler LIDAR drone workflow from planning to deliverables
Wingtra LIDAR offers minimal setup time and full compatibility with 3rd party analysis tools.
Plan and manage
Capture
Easily capture your LIDAR data with the WingtraRAY drone. Its portability and carry-on batteries make it perfect for efficient field use and air travel.
Process
Analyze
Deliver
Deliver high-quality outputs, like point clouds, DTM/DSM, and much more.
Where this LIDAR drone works best
From construction to forestry, Wingtra LIDAR provides accurate insights to support complex, real-world applications.
Minimize costly rework with accurate data
- High-res topographic data to prevent rework
- Safe data capture in hard-to-reach areas
- Up to 40% reduction in labor and data collection time
- Up to 5% increase in margins thanks to fewer errors
Get accurate high-res topographic data
Move beyond traditional methods to manage land much more efficiently and precisely based on high-resolution data and georeferenced maps.
- Georeferenced high-res maps for GIS
- Streamlined property and boundary definitions
- Detailed topographic insights on natural features
- Efficient data capture across large, hard-to-reach areas
Data sets
Forest biomass stress and disease monitoring
- Large-area monitoring with 25-40% cost savings
- Data capture up to 40% faster with Wingtra’s speed
- Up to 35% more accurate biomass and carbon stock analysis
- Efficient data collection in hard-to-reach terrain
Same-day data for keen operational decisions
- Accurate, high-res same-day data delivery
- Safe data collection without halting operations
- Data collected up to 40% faster than traditional methods
- 99% accuracy in vegetation monitoring for effective reclamation
LIDAR drone specifications for reliable, superior data combined with high-efficiency coverage.
* At 300 ft, 30% side overlap
Why experts choose Wingtra LIDAR
Geospatial Manager Raleigh, NC at WSP
Program Manager for Unmanned Airborne Lidar and Imagery, McKim & Creed
Get your high-quality, reliable LIDAR data more efficiently and easier than ever before.
LIDAR drone resources
FAQ
What is a LIDAR drone?
When should I use a LIDAR drone instead of photogrammetry?
Use a LIDAR drone when you need better ground detection through vegetation, more reliable terrain capture in complex environments, or data less affected by shadows and surface texture.
Photogrammetry remains a strong choice for many open-site mapping jobs, which is why teams often use both methods depending on the project.
What makes a good drone LIDAR system?
A good drone LIDAR system needs more than a strong scanner. It should also combine a reliable IMU, accurate GNSS positioning, efficient field setup, clean strip alignment, and a workflow that does not create extra processing overhead after every flight.
What can a LIDAR drone be used for?
How accurate is a LIDAR drone?
Drone LIDAR scanners: how do they work and what makes them accurate (or not!)
A LIDAR drone represents an active sensing method. To know what that means, compare it to a photogrammetry drone, which carries a passive sensor; it flies and the camera shutter opens and closes to passively capture light information in the form of pixels that form photographs.
A LIDAR scanner for drone actively sends light pulses—by the hundreds per square meter— out and captures them, recording how fast they return to the LIDAR sensor.
The optical module on a LIDAR laser scanner for drone contains components to send and receive laser light pulses; here is a more recent mock-up of where the tech is today.
A sensor that does all this with precision and accuracy will require some tightly coordinated hardware. In fact, the three critical components to a LIDAR drone sensor are the LIDAR laser scanner, which sends the light pulses, the inertial measurement unit, which measures the force and rate of movement of the sensor, and a GNSS unit, to tie the information to actual geolocations on the ground.
The quality of these components and how tightly they are engineered will make a difference in the quality of the data you collect. This is especially true with LIDAR onfor drones, because the speed at which drones with lidar travel combined with the distance from the ground introduces more challenges to capturing accurate data.
Let’s look at each component and consider the quality range:
The laser scanner
You can think of this as the part that is responsible for sending and receiving the light pulses. We can look at the quality of this component according some key factors:
- Wavelength and power. A high quality laser scanner will procure a stable and precise wavelength at a higher power so that the range is longer and it’s more resilient in conditions, like fog, rain or bright sunlight. Lower quality scanners have less stable wavelengths and less power, making the performance less dependable.
- Beam divergence is how tight and focused the laser beam is over a distance, the lower the divergence, the better. Lower quality scanners have high divergence and a reduced ability to detect smaller features.
- Pulse repetition frequency is just as it sounds: the ability to send and receive more pulses in a given time. More is better and results in higher resolution results.
As a quality benchmark, Wingtra LIDAR system features top-of-the range Hesai XT32M2X 32-Channel 360° Spinning Mid-Range Lidar laser scanner for drones technology for consistent and reliable results.
- Quality optics minimize distortion and information loss for clearer and more accurate measurements.
- The receiver quality is key to whether or not the LIDAR sensor can pick up weaker returns from a greater height above ground and amidst more vegetation.
- The actual scanning mechanism involves solid-state tech that operates consistently over many repetitions when it is high quality. Lower quality mechanisms may falter in their performance and produce inaccuracies, inconsistencies and even gaps in coverage.
Calibration: a high-quality LIDAR scanner is regularly calibrated and maintains that calibration over time for consistency. Lower quality scanners can drift out of calibration, which impacts reliability of the data.
The inertial measurement unit (IMU)
This is the part of the LIDAR sensor for drone that tracks where it is in space and time so that the results captured by the LIDAR scanner can be tracked accordingly. The better the IMU quality, the more aligned your results are and less work you need to do to correct them after a flight (see strip alignment info box below). To assess quality, you’ll want to consider five key factors here:
- A high-quality IMU measures angular rates and accelerations with high accuracy and precision due to superior tech and advanced calibration processes. This results in lower drift rates which minimizes errors. In contrast, a lower-quality IMU will be prone more drift as well as errors and noise that reduce its reliability.
- Better IMUs rely on better components, including advanced gyroscopes and accelerometers that have better temperature stability and higher sensitivity. They may incorporate magnetometers to bring the performance up even more. Lower quality IMUs are prone to temperature changes resulting in poorer performance.
- Sampling rates correlate directly with quality: higher sampling means more frequent data collection and more detail, which is critical in such a dynamic active sensor environment where the drone with LIDAR sensor is moving fast.
- Noise filtering is key to the function of an IMU as the sensors own activity and external interference must be identified and disqualified from the data. Lower-quality sensors may struggle to filter this noise, which will introduce it to the results, which will have to be cleaned in post-process to be useful.
GNSS receiver
For a drone LIDAR drone survey, GNSS receiver plays a crucial role in determining the drone’s position relative to Earth. This information is factored into the information about pulse transmission and receipt.
Here are five key factors that distinguish a high-quality GNSS receiver from a lower-quality one in drones with LIDAR:
- The accuracy and precision of your GNSS receiver correlates directly with quality level. Higher quality receivers support multi-frequency bands and all major satellite systems, i.e. GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou. So position accuracy is down to centimeter-level, , ensuring reliable results for lidar drone mapping..
- Signal acquisition is faster in higher-quality receivers, even in challenging environments like canyons, dense forest and around tall infrastructure, so the lock is strong and the performance is consistent. With LIDAR drone data capture, you don’t want to lose lock because of a low-end receiver as it throws all the positioning data for that unlocked period into question.
- Tech to minimize interference and signal jamming is a standard feature of a high-end GNSS receiver so that performance is more reliable in places where these factors will pop up. Interference affecting lower-end receivers can reduce their ability to provide accurate positioning data.
- Position update rate is higher in better-quality receivers. This is important for a LIDAR mapping drone, where the aircraft is moving fast, and the data needs to be tied to a location as frequently as possible.
Beyond these specifics, all components need to be robust and durable in environments that present humidity, vibration and temperature extremes. This ensures dependable performance over a long sensor lifetime.
How much does a LIDAR drone cost—and save—you today?
LIDAR drone price can range from more than 100K or as little as 20K depending on what you want to do with them and the quality you need from the data.
Read this article for a deeper breakdown of cost and performance across the most popular models today.