Great news! We’ve just launched WingtraGROUND. This revolutionary ground control kit completes a true end-to-end solution, combining drone, field setup and processing into a single, fluid toolchain—so both experts and beginners can run professional-grade aerial surveys with ease. The all-in-one setup eliminates the things that eat up the most time in the field and removes errors that cost even more time later. Now, surveyors and GIS teams can rely on a single solution for fast, reliable insights.
“Drone data holds the power to boost safety and productivity across a range of vital industries,” said André Becker, Senior Product Manager at Wingtra. “Yet when you need high accuracy, you need ground truth to prove it. The current error-prone ground control setup—which requires a lot of expertise to get right—has been a big blocker to unlocking the potential of drone data use. So we’re happy to bring you WingtraGROUND, offering a unified workflow for even beginner-level surveyors to get high-accuracy drone maps.”
What is WingtraGROUND, exactly?
WingtraGROUND is a portable, all-in-one survey kit featuring receivers—powered by Emlid technology—that are integrated into the Wingtra ecosystem. Users are prompted step-by-step through the setup process as the software reads the location of the receivers, which serve as base station and rover, and prompts actions until everything is in place for accurate readings.
WingtraGROUND is 4x faster to set up than traditional equipment, with automatic connections, step-by-step guidance, and precise GNSS accuracy,* making drone surveying simple and reliable.
This development by Wingtra marks a turning point in drone data capture—because behind the scenes of the race to build a more reliable, more powerful drone, there was always this complicated ground control process, involving technical knowhow and troubleshooting.
“Until now, even if you had the best drone, you still needed to know how to use a range of tools from different manufacturers,” Becker explained. “Since these components are not interconnected, workflows were really disjointed. You then risked faulty ground setup, inaccurate data and a lot of wasted time backtracking to troubleshoot. This part of the workflow was begging for ease-of-use and seamless integration, so that’s what we’re offering today.”
Democratizing survey expertise to maximize aerial data capture
Professional surveyors spend a lot of time adjusting their workflows to a range of disparate tools that all involve learning curves and many manual steps. This presents a logistical barrier to members of a team with less experience, such as engineers who need the data but won’t be able to handle the complex workflow reliably.
WingtraGROUND has been developed to address the key pain points in the traditional ground setup process so that even team members with less experience can go out and grab the data. Specifically it:
- Walks users step by step through a synced guided receiver placement process for base station and rover
- Integrates once-cumbersome tool chains for aerial and ground data collection into one succinct process
- Makes it easy to integrate high-accuracy, rich aerial surveys into your existent workflows
- Prevents data loss or incomplete data acquisition due to human error or disjointed systems
- Offers a portable, high-quality solution for surveys that are out of range of a reliable CORS network
- Serves as a dependable tech partner for field crew who are not certified surveyors, but who need accurate maps
This development—in the context of the seamless WingtraCLOUD workflow—empowers new organizations and many more stakeholders to gather and understand the rich, life-like insights that aerial surveys provide through a range of maps and analytics possibilities. It’s effectively removing a major speedbump along the road to drone data adoption across industries, which will make sites safer and more productive.
*Down to 3 cm horizontal.
