VRS link to UAS

One of the reasons I got involved in the COST action was that they were going to look at ways of improving UAS navigation accuracy during the mission, not just using ground control and post processing once you were back in the office. I had met MaVinci UAS vendors at Survey Ireland this year who were selling a Sirius Pro

which had a base station link and could negate the need for ground control, but I wasn't sure was this just providing high accuracy Geotags that would then be used in post-processing the data. Either way it was impressive....

Today - SenseFly (the guys who almost started the survey UAS craze with the Swinglet) launched the latest version of the eBee, the eBee RTK

Which not only has a base station link, but also works by VRS. VRS is something most surveyors will be familiar with, it is a mobile phone/internet, 'virtual reference station' that provides the GNSS receiver with real time corrections from the local active station network. In Ireland that's operated by OSi, although a number of vendors have created their own to ensure they could have them where they wanted them and to avoid problems if OSi took the off-line for any reason. Added to that - they very clearly state that real time corrections are being transmitted to the UAV mission planning software and the flight plan is being updated constantly. This is particularly important for UASs operating the push broom type of spectrometer, where post processing or image matching is not an easy option.