DARTdrones and DroneDeploy Announce Partnership to Train Drone Mappers

Two industry leaders have partnered to offer professional training the industry sorely needs: drone mapping.

DARTdrones and DroneDeploy will collaborate on a series of workshops and courses to educate drone pilots on aerial mapping, a sought after skill in the enterprise.  Mapping is heavily used in agriculture, construction, transportation and other major verticals that commonly use drone technology.

The program will begin this fall with its first workshop, Aerial Mapping and Modeling with DroneDeploy.

“The need for drone mapping services for contractors, farmers, miners, and building inspectors is increasing each day, ” says the program announcement. “The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) calculated the agriculture and construction industries alone constituted for 47 percent of commercial drone use in 2016. So far, more than 30,000 remote pilots that have been licensed by the FAA since August. This new workshop will provide a clear training path for remote pilots interested in offering drone mapping services.”

DroneDeploy is the leading cloud-based drone data platform, providing a robust ecosystem of apps and solutions.  The company provides a database of operators specializing in drone mapping to meet their customers’ needs, but demand often outweighs supply for the valuable expertise.   DARTdrones – seen earlier this year on ABC’s “Shark Tank”- is the industry’s leading drone training and consulting company.

The flagship course is a two-day intensive workshop designed to teach drone pilots how to collect, analyze and export high-quality drone mapping and modeling data. Topics include: aerial mapping use cases, fundamentals of drone image capture, techniques for capturing aerial data for mapping, use of the DroneDeploy platform, and ways to improve map accuracy.

“Many of our students are interested in offering their aerial mapping services to architects, engineering firms, construction companies, farmers, and environmentalists,” said CEO and Co-founder of DARTdrones, Abby Speicher. “Mapping can be confusing and complex to get into. We are excited that our Workshop will increase the number of qualified aerial mappers in the market.”

“We’re thrilled to partner with DARTdrones to create a training program for the commercial drone industry,” said Mike Winn, CEO of DroneDeploy. “Our goal is to provide commercial pilots with the training and tools to expand drone mapping into every industry.”

The Workshop will be offered three times in 2017:
· September 9th and 10th in Las Vegas, Nevada
· September 30th and October 1st in San Francisco, California
· November 2nd and 3rd in Ashburn, Virginia

The October course in Virginia will be hosted in partnership with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) at the NTSB Training Center. A team from the NTSB has already been using drones for site documentation, which can include mapping, 3D modeling, wreckage search, terrain mapping, and viewpoint photography and video. The NTSB will use the Workshop to expand their team of trained drone pilots.

The Aerial Mapping and Modeling with DroneDeploy Workshop is launching in conjunction with three other DARTdrones workshops: Rapid Daytime Aerial Search and Rescue, Drone Journalism, and Aerial Roof Inspections.