What does Mozart have to do with drones?

Hohensalzburg Fortress proudly sits on the fortress hill above Austria’s fourth-largest city on the Salzach. We will probably never know whether Mozart was interested in drones, but one thing is certain: the magnificent view of the fortress that can be enjoyed from the terrace of the faculty of natural sciences of the University of Salzburg has probably not changed much in the last 250 years.

This is exactly where AGIT celebrates its 30th birthday in July 2018. The conference and trade fair for applied GeoInformaTik, the largest event in this sector in the German-speaking world, combines innovation and tradition like no other. For three days, more than 1000 players from science and industry exchanged views on the latest topics and developments in the field of geoinformation and its diverse fields of application.

FlyNex at AGIT 2018

This year FlyNex participated for the first time. We were also one of more than 50 exhibitors at AGIT Expo and also we had a presentation at the UAS Summit, the specialist forum for drone applications at AGIT.

“me | places | spaces” was this year’s motto and it focussed on people as individuals even in times of big data, social sensing, digitization, and globalization. The human being, who is at a certain place at any time of his existence – a location, which only becomes a sphere of action with a radius of action through corresponding semantic connections. It is not only in the field of drones that privacy and data protection are increasingly at stake.

The UAS Summit, to which we were also invited to contribute, provided us with particularly exciting presentations and discussions. One of our geodata specialists gave a lecture on flight planning, flying, and data analysis. The international contributions were multifaceted. Some of the presentations focused on the problems of data acquisition, e.g. laser scanning, thermal or hyperspectral imaging, and the use of open source technologies. Others, on the other hand, dealt with the optimization of analysis processes and how the use of drones can contribute to answering a wide variety of technical questions.

Using drones: Yes! But where?

With all these applications, the question “Where can I fly?” remains. With the rapidly growing number of drones in the airspace, AGIT was also able to make contributions to prevent the misuse of drones – intentionally and unintentionally. It was found that the unintentional cases of misuse are currently far more frequent. This shows how urgently applications like Map2Fly are needed. Pilots need the possibility to find out quickly and clearly where, how, and when they are allowed to fly. The most important basis for this is as detailed and up-to-date geodata as possible about the areas or objects to be considered on the earth’s surface and in the airspace.

In lectures and at the booth we informed about these questions, presented FlyNex and its products in detail, and received positive feedback.
Many users and interested parties praised the concept. They hope that our applications will become even better known, also in order to prevent misbehavior caused by ignorance in the use of drones, so that the drone business can maintain the possibility of rapid growth.

From the dialogues with users, interested parties, and industry colleagues as well as from interesting workshops and lectures we received a lot of suggestions to continuously expand and improve our products.

At the last look at the medieval castle complex on the way to the railway station, we noticed that AGIT was really worth it and we are looking forward to coming back.

The FlyNex Team