Coordinate Systems and Drones
January 12, 2017 11 Comments
And now back to our regularly scheduled program… Have you heard of the drone invasion?
For those hiding under a rock because of the election, or other apocalyptic event, drones have come to the forefront of data capture for many types of projects. Surveyors are actively digging into the technology to see how it can help them capture existing conditions quickly and at what quality they can capture.3DR and DJI are two companies that are offering drones to the commercial AEC industry.
For full disclosure, Synergis is now a partner with 3DR to provide the technology to our local customers.
The basic idea is the drone would fly a given area, take several pictures and upload that data to a cloud service to create composite imagery or elevation models. In order to accomplish this, All commercial drones have some sort of GPS recorder to stamp each image with coordinates. For clarity, this position stamp is rough in nature given the process described above and is typically within 5′ of the actual location. This is NOT acceptable to most survey firms for anything other than “napkin” sketched projects.
Many services have added the ability to add survey control to the process in order to tighten up the results. There is a best practices method to laying out the control over the capture area. According to 3DR, they can improve the location (x,y) accuracy of their data to within an inch!
In order to accomplish this correction, one bit of information is the need to have an EPSG code to identify the control’s coordinate system.Simply search by state or other information to find the EPSG code. For future reference, here are a few local codes to Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
| State | Coordinate System | Unit | EPSG Code |
| NJ | NAD83 | Ft | 3424 |
| NSRS2007 | Ft | 3616 | |
| NAD83/2011 | Ft | 6527 | |
| PA | NAD83 North | Ft | 2271 |
| NAD83 South | Ft | 2272 | |
| NSRS2007 North | Ft | 3650 | |
| NSRS2007 South | Ft | 3652 |
In case you need to transform your control coordinates, there is a great tool in that same website to re-project your coordinates from one system to another:
https://epsg.io/transform#s_srs=4326&t_srs=3857
Lastly, if you have Recap 360 Pro, there is a setting to specify the coordinate system. In that setting you use a portion of a typical code (PA83 for instance) and get results which also include the EPSG code.
Until next time…
