Spexi Geospatial is launching the LayerDrone Foundation and its decentralized network aimed at encouraging a community of amateur drone pilots to capture ultra-high resolution Earth imagery.
Launched a year ago, Spexi said its reward-driven pilots have captured over 10 million images across 2.3 million acres of Earth, and now it’s going to further incentivize them through the LayerDrone Network, a decentralized network that can enable next-generation spatial AI applications ranging from disaster response to autonomous vehicle training.
“We set out to create a new drone platform to socialize drone pilots,” said Bill Lakeland, CEO of Spexi, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We incentivize them with this novel model to capture data for us in an automated way. It makes it fast and easy for drone pilots to capture cities all over the world, very quickly at 900 times more resolution than we get from satellites and significantly more than we get from aircraft at a much faster cadence.”
On top of that, he believes it will be 50 times more cost effective than other methods like downward-pointing airplane cameras or satellite imaging.
Alec Wilson, COO of Spexi, added in an interview with GamesBeat, “It’s the largest standardized drone imaging network on Earth with over 100,000 missions flown of drones capturing standardized imagery across the largest cities in North America. We have captured entire cities using off-the-shelf drones. We are hitting the gas pedal on capturing imagery all over North America and launching the spinout of the LayerDrone Foundation.”
Spexi is launching a blockchain foundation dubbed LayerDrone Foundation.
In the past year, Spexi has given out more than $1 million in drone pilot rewards, And now it’s going to …