C’mon, really? It’s true, as I found out a few days ago during a meeting in Moncton.  I was told about a small drone fitted with a camera that could take vertical, aerial photographs above the site of an engineering failure, a slip and fall accident or a traffic accident and do this within Transport Canada’s regulations.  For that matter, the site of any personal injury.

I was at a meeting of CATAIR, the Canadian Association of Technical Accident Investigators and Reconstructionists.

Transport Canada’s strict regulations considers any drone weighing less than 250 grams a toy.  The Zerotech Dobby Pocket Selfie drone weighs 219 grams fitted with a battery and a 4K HD camera and costs about $350 Cdn – just a toy.  For a look-see and demonstration, Google ZEROTECH Dobby Pocket Selfie Drone FPV With 4K HD Camera  

I can imagine carrying one of these around – almost in your pocket – during a visual assessment of a site like we carry a carpenter’s tape now.  Maybe they’ll be standard issue in the future in the tool kit of forensic engineers, civil litigation lawyers, claims managers and others concerned with a site that has a problem.

The kid’s toy Dobby drone doesn’t take good quality aerial video, which I rely on during my forensic investigations – it’s not fitted with a gimbal –  but it does take inexpensive vertical photographs quickly.  These would be photographs a little like those we engineers used to take of a site from the raised bucket of an excavator or a boom truck.

(A gimbal is a device that keeps a camera level and minimizes vibration.  The basic device has been known for centuries – but it’s not on the toy Dobby because it increases the weight and cost)

Frame grabs of single photographs of the ground from good quality aerial video are easy to get like those from a toy drone but aerial video takes more time to organize and process and is more expensive.

I plan to compare the quality of vertical photographs taken with a toy drone of a site I’m investigating now to that of a frame grab from an aerial video.  I’ll wait till the leaves fall from the tree-covered site so we can see the ground better.  I’ll let you know how they compare..