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Closer and closer to the automatic mapping drones from Prometheus.

I wonder what the optimum group of technologies is that would enable that kind of mapping? Would you pile on LIDAR, RADAR, this tech, ultrasound, magnetic sensing, etc etc. Although, you're then getting a flying tricorder. Which could enable some cool uses even outside the stereotypical search and rescue.



Are you talking about mapping tunnels with drones? That's already done and it doesn't really need any 'AI': it's plain old SLAM.

DARPA's subterranean challenge had many teams that did some pretty cool stuff in this direction: https://spectrum.ieee.org/darpa-subterranean-challenge-26571...


You already have depth anything v2 that can generate depthmap in realtime even on iPhone. Quality is pretty good but probably will be even improved in the future. Actually in many ways those depthmaps are much better quality than iPhone Lidar or Truedepth camera (that cannot handle transparent, metalic, reflective surfaces and also they have a big noise).

https://github.com/DepthAnything/Depth-Anything-V2

https://huggingface.co/spaces/pablovela5620/depth-compare

https://huggingface.co/apple/coreml-depth-anything-v2-small


You don't need or want generative AI for mapping, you "just" need lidar and drones for slam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CWWP9jb4cE


High-res images from multiple perspectives should be sufficient. If you have a consumer drone, this product (no affiliation) is extremely impressive: https://www.dronedeploy.com/

You basically select an area on a map that you want to model in 3d, it flies your drone (take-off, flight path, landing), takes pictures, uploads to their servers for processing, generates point cloud, etc. Very powerful.


What you could do with WebODM is already quite impressive




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