The flight is the easy part. What costs a survey department its week is everything after
landing: processing, getting the output onto the grid the pit actually works in, converting
it into something a browser can open, and putting it where engineering, geology and
operations can all see the same thing. This does all of that on your own hardware, watched,
without anybody driving it.
Five stages, none of which needs a person once it is running. Imagery and ground control
land in a watched folder and the rest happens on a schedule.
On your GPU
Photogrammetry On Your Own GPU
Open-source photogrammetry running on the same server as the rest of the platform.
A few hundred images from a flight process in hours on a current GPU, and the
imagery can remain on approved mine infrastructure. Compute, storage and processing scope are agreed before deployment, so there is no
queue behind somebody else's job.
The hard part
Every Grid The Pit Actually Uses
Operating mines accumulate coordinate systems: a historical pit grid, a plant grid, a
grid inherited with an acquisition, and UTM underneath all of it. Output is placed against
a surveyed control network with a proper transform, so survey products, fleet positions and
dump records land on top of each other rather than near each other.
Openable
Terrain A Laptop Can Handle
Raw point clouds and full-resolution rasters are useless to everyone except the person
with the workstation. Products are tiled and converted to streaming terrain, so the same
surface opens in a browser in the dispatch office, in a truck, and in a meeting.
Published
Nobody Emails A File
Finished products are registered as GIS layers automatically and appear on the shared
mine map and in the 3D viewer. There is no step where somebody copies a deliverable into a
folder and tells people the name of it.
Watched
A Stale Surface Is A Red Card
The health portal tracks how long since the last successful publish. A pipeline that
quietly stops shows up as a failed check rather than as a map that everybody keeps trusting
for another three weeks.
Audit trail
Provenance On Every Surface
The automated path has no operator, so it records the flight and the run. The manual
path does, and it is attributed: a point cloud, orthomosaic or design surface uploaded
through the portal is signed by a domain-authenticated user, timestamped, and recorded
against the version it replaced. When somebody asks which surface a decision was made
against, the answer is a lookup rather than a conversation.
Field
Back Out To The Pit
The same layers reach tablets in the field through mobile mapping, offline capable,
so the current surface is available in the places where radio is not.
Production deployed
QFieldCloud & Live-Map Design Management
QFieldCloud hosting and a complete design-management backend connect field jobs to
the live mine map. The backend automatically updates jobs in QFieldCloud as designs
are managed through the map. Expanded DXF validation is also complete and production deployed.
Implementation example
The survey portal and the grid converter.
Two of the pieces, running today: the portal that takes a flight through to published
products, and the converter that handles coordinate work interactively when somebody needs a
one-off answer rather than a pipeline run.
Why the converter exists: the pipeline handles bulk work, but a surveyor,
engineer or geologist regularly needs a handful of points moved between grids right now, and
the alternative is a spreadsheet somebody built years ago that nobody wants to audit. This
reads survey files directly, converts against the same control network the pipeline uses, and
exports to CAD, so the interactive answer and the automated answer cannot disagree.
Screenshots from production systems. Site identifiers, serial numbers and personnel details have been altered. Public demos use synthetic data.
That answer, and how many grid conventions your operation is carrying, is usually the whole scoping conversation. Tell us what you fly and what you pay to process it.
Technical services need controlled publication of survey deliverables in an agreed coordinate frame.
Built and running in mine operations. The implementation examples show the workflow and outputs. The Technology & Data Assessment defines the data connections, configuration and acceptance criteria for your mine. Public demonstrations use synthetic data.
What it doesDrone photogrammetry, point-cloud processing, orthomosaics, coordinate transforms, terrain surfaces, DXF validation, QFieldCloud hosting and design publication. The production live-map design-management backend automatically updates jobs in QFieldCloud.
Data requiredAuthorized drone images and control, survey/design files, source/target coordinate systems and capture metadata.
PrerequisitesSurvey control and residual checks, flight permissions, IT storage/compute capacity and acceptance criteria for accuracy and currency.
OutputsVersioned terrain and ortho layers, transformed deliverables, publication status and browser map/digital-twin views.
ImplementationAccess, integration, cybersecurity and data quality are assessed before duration or acceptance is committed. Existing workflow descriptions are not delivery guarantees.
Software subscriptions provide platform access and include applicable updates, defect fixes and standard product maintenance. Optional Premium Support is $50,000 CAD per mine annually for additional operational assistance under agreed service terms. Custom development, new integrations, custom reporting, specialized analysis and advanced troubleshooting outside support scope are separately billed consulting at $260 CAD/hour, unless expressly included in a signed agreement. All amounts exclude applicable taxes.
Implementation is quoted for deployment requirements. No consulting hours or Premium Support are automatically bundled with software. Estimate software, support and consulting.