Born out of a need to help others
Hurricane Florence in 2018 inspired the creation of BirdOne. During Florence, founding members of BirdOne managed drone crews assisting electric utility companies. Our teams worked closely with the utilities damage assessor's responsible for identifying damage so they could deploy line crews. Equipped with a laptop and a GIS map, damage assessors would walk difficult areas with flooding, and debris. Drones speed up the process considerably. The challenge became, how do you easily correlate the drone data with their work management system so that problems could be corrected sooner? The first 24 to 48 hours are the most important after a storm. Using drones was still taking 72 hours or more. Data was collected all day, handed to someone to review the next day, damage locations were then identified, location information was manually extracted from imagery and correlated to their database, and finally crews were deployed to the location. After this experience we felt that there had to be a better way to do this.
After Florence we set out to create BirdOne for this very purpose. We wanted to use drones and GIS to unleash the full potential of these tools for storm response. We discovered that not only are these powerful tools during a storm, they were incredibly useful for all types of applications. Having your drones fully integrated into your GIS system provides so much value every day. It brings your data right to the most difficult places to reach and allows you to use that information right where you need it and share your results near real-time with the rest of your team. Once you are able to use it, you will understand that the days of these systems being disconnected is over forever.
After Florence we set out to create BirdOne for this very purpose. We wanted to use drones and GIS to unleash the full potential of these tools for storm response. We discovered that not only are these powerful tools during a storm, they were incredibly useful for all types of applications. Having your drones fully integrated into your GIS system provides so much value every day. It brings your data right to the most difficult places to reach and allows you to use that information right where you need it and share your results near real-time with the rest of your team. Once you are able to use it, you will understand that the days of these systems being disconnected is over forever.