BIM From Space - Part 2

BIM From a Distance - Part 2 is out now in the Summer edition of the Surveyors Journal - what more could you want on the hottest day of the summer so far!? Take a look now to find out how the SCSI port mapping study story ends - spoiler alert - the satellite did it.

God, i'd love an ice-pop.

National Space Strategy Published

The National Space Strategy Consultation of July 2018 got some useful info and feedback - as part of the SCSI RS & EO working group we provided feedback from the mapping/built environment/property sectors - and the follow up meeting in August was an interesting experience with lots of stakeholders gathered to voice their opinions. The culmination of all this work resulted in the launch yesterday by Minister Halligan of the first National Space Strategy for Ireland 2019 - 2025. Plenty of food for thought and the section on upskilling in particular caught my eye following a recent SFI Discovery submission.

Drone Industry Day - Maynooth University

Thanks to Tim and the team for a very interesting day of talks on North Campus. Beginning with an update on the rapidly approaching European Drone Regs - and followed by speakers discussing things ranging from Manna (the best name ever for a drone food delivery company) to ways to stop wifi, radio or GPS piloted rogue drones - i got plenty of food for thought. One of the tools shown on the video was a giant electromagnetic gun that can fry a drones circuit-board from quite a distance.. Advances in UTM are one to watch and one of the early speakers told us that the first apartment (i can't remember if its an apartment or a block of apartments) built in London with its own drone delivery pad is opening tomorrow. The times they are a-changing...

New Drones @ Department of Geography

Took delivery of two drones this morning.

One is a Parrott Bluegrass - a rugged, out of the box rotary drone with a forward facing oblique RGB camera and a nadir looking Parrott Sequioa. A very nice piece of kit, eliminates many of the issues I spoke about before with bespoke integration mounts for sensors on the DJI series.

The other is a  fixed wing - covers a much wider area and has RGB capability via a canon camera.

Looking forward to testing these two out - need to renew my SOP and license and then up, up and away.....

EUGEO - CIG2019

A big congrats to the team at NUIG for hosting such a great event - some really interesting talks over the 4 days and some nice weather for a trip to Galway. The EO session went well, Daithí and I had some really interesting speakers in a dual session - everything from satellite SAR to Drone photogrammetry.

That's it for 2019 - commiserations to Cian and team at Trinity who are hosting it next year.

Smart Farming

Liadh Kelly and Peter Mooney from Dept of CS are organising a smart farming event in mid June (12th) - two talks in particular might be of interest to Geo's/RSers - I'm giving some demos on Copernicus and satellite applications, Aidan from NCG is giving a demo of drones and what they can do. Looks like it will be an interesting day and a good line up of speakers. Aimed at techie and non-tecchie/policy makers alike - so spread the word.

My role is also tied in with SCSI - who released the annual Land Review with Teagasc last week, outreach like this and training is one of the goals of the Earth Observation and RS working group.

Stronger Standards, Stronger Profession

Survey Ireland was a success again - lots of the usual faces and ran smoothly and to plan in Dunboyne (with the usual ice cream treat).

Very wide range of speakers - starting with Lorraine McNerney and the UN GGIM Sustainable Development Goals and followed closely by James Kavanagh and the RICS standards work. I was particularly interested in a doc he mentioned on promoting security of tenure in developing countries. As well as that we had a talk on mental wellbeing - an important topic for such a busy profession and even had a talk on projections finishing up as a slide on snakes and ladders. The Discovery Programme did the usual visual feast for the yes on their range of projects over the years - Skellig Michael in particular.

The age-old riddle remains unanswered - how to get students to attend these events. There were free tickets this year and I still only saw one student!

Well done to Niamh for arranging the excellent lineup and to Edel, Patrick and team for keeping things running so smoothly.