Septentrio's Enhanced Georeferencing Solutions for Drone Aerial Survey

Septentrio’s product suite for drone surveys includes the AsteRx-m UAS GNSS receiver, its companion GeoTagZ software utility and the Altus NR2 RTK base station.

The AsteRx-m UAS board is about the size of a credit card, and has been designed for easy integration into the drone’s autopilot and camera. Key features include:

• Lightweight and low power consumption, providing longer air time on station
• Industry-leading multipath and interference rejection for reliable performance under challenging propagation conditions
• Automatic synchronization with camera to log events with precise time stamps

GeoTagZ is a high-accuracy drone positioning and image georeferencing software package that works with the AsteRx-m UAS receiver. Key features include:

• Centimeter georeferencing of images captured by the drone’s camera
• No ground control points needed
• No real-time data link needed to achieve RTK-level accuracies
• Intuitive graphic user interface
• Automatic integration into Drone2Map and ArcGIS workflows

Open architecture to work with other popular image processing platforms, including Pix4D and PhotoScan

For optimum performance, Septentrio’s versatile Altus NR2 base station can be used as a base station to provide RTK-level reference data for GeoTagZ.

“The combination of AsteRx-m UAS and GeoTagZ reduces complexity and improves efficiency in field operations by providing centimeter-level geotagging of images from the drone camera without real-time data links or ground control points,” said Septentrio’s product manager Gustavo Lopez. “GeoTagZ also streamlines the process for Esri users by interfacing automatically with Drone2Map without manual intervention.”