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Sydney-headquartered drone technology group Aerologix, in partnership with digital mapping company Soar, are gearing up this year to launch a world-first detailed view of the globe in 3D by combining drone imagery, satellite data and maps on a single platform.
The Perth-based Soar, which over the past eight years has been creating the world's largest digital atlas, has joined forces with Aerologix to leverage their respective strengths in the mapping space.
"This partnership is a game-changer for the drone industry and mapping technology," says Aerologix co-founder and CEO Tom Caska.
"By combining our extensive network of professional drone pilots with Soar's powerful distribution platform, we're creating unprecedented access to aerial imagery while opening new revenue streams for our pilot community. Together, we're creating the new atlas of the world."
The partners plan to officially launch the new platform in the next few months.
“We have been uploading hundreds of maps into the platform and it has been pretty mind-blowing how many clicks we got and how many people want access to this, from advertisers to schools and environmental firms,” Caska tells Business News Australia.
“People have been loving the up-to-date rich data. There’s certainly a market for it and there’s a lot more that we can do with it in the future.”
Aerologix, which was co-founded by Caska with Rakesh Routhu in 2019, hosts a global network of about 40,000 drone pilots who utilise the company’s app which packages complex drone flight paths into a single-touch operation.
The company expanded in 2023 with the acquisition of Mappa, a South American-based operation that helped establish AerologixMaps, the company’s cutting-edge image-processing platform used for aerial mapping and imagery.
Caska, a former pilot, describes the existing Aerologix platform as a “very powerful bit of software” that can build three-dimensional (3D) maps using drone imagery.
“We are able to get real high-fidelity imagery, from being able to zoom into serial numbers on built assets and from the natural environment as well.
“We have 3D, the ability to look back in time (via a library of past images) and we’re essentially plugging that in now to the Soar platform which is a very robust platform in its own right.”
The Soar platform, which currently comprises almost one million maps, is already used by major media outlets such as the BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as resource companies and students.
Soar’s open-source platform is built on input from the likes of NASA, the European Union and satellite imagery companies, as well as map enthusiasts, which Caska says delivers “some really interesting data”.
“It’s almost like the YouTube of maps,” he says.
Aerologix, which began beta testing the new platform with Soar about a year ago, brings to the partnership its network of 40,000 drone pilots across Australia, New Zealand and a few hundred in the US.
Caska says plans are under way to grow its US network to 200,000 drone pilots over the next two years, which will give the partners access to an array of imagery.
“That information then can augment the Soar platform and combined with other data sets like satellite imagery, aircraft imagery and other maps including historical maps, when you put all that together it becomes a really interesting platform that has many applications,” he says.
“In the past, the problem has been looking at these different data sets and trying to make sense of them. What this platform does is bring them all together and with our ability to scale we can provide data from our growing network.”
Aerologix is among a limited number of drone companies approved by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority’s (CASA) digital sky platform, which provides its drone pilot network with critical weather updates, location-based information and maps.
“What I love about Aerologix is that it's not just a global solution, but also one with a vast network that offers incredible scalability,” says Soar founder and CEO Amir Farhand.
“The platform is designed for seamless interaction, and we are excited to partner and contribute to the end goal of building the world’s biggest atlas.”
Caska describes Soar as the missing link for its Mappa network.
“We built the network, the software, the apps and the auto-flight tech to fly the drones, but we didn’t have the geospatial platform to provide all this information in a digestible way back to the customer,” he says.
“What this will do is provide much more work for drone pilots as Soar scales and builds out its commercial model and as we scale as a company too.”
Caska says he is most excited about the environmental datasets that the platform can also provide to assist governments and organisations with keeping the planet healthy.
“So, it’s not just visual imagery but multispectral, hyperspectral, methane detection and a lot of other sets of information that you can get from the drones and that we can also augment with new satellite information,” he says.
“This is a great commercial play but what excites me are the environmental implications which is something that I have always been really passionate about.”
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