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Table of Contents
Expanding boundaries with BVLOS mapping and surveying
The geospatial industry has been one of the most widespread and enthusiastic adopters of drone technology. When you consider the advantages drones bring to creating deliverables such as orthomosaic maps and 3D LiDAR point clouds, it’s easy to see why.
The use of drones for mapping and surveying allows GIS professionals to bring down project person-hours and costs compared to manned aircraft and lets specialists reduce their time in the field. Drones can take off from and land almost anywhere, with the ability to access hazardous and otherwise difficult-to-reach areas such as mountainous regions, coastlines, and volcanoes. They can also fly at lower altitudes and perform surveys faster with higher resolutions and less interference from weather conditions such as cloud cover.
Businesses across many industry verticals have come to understand the value of drone data, and these developing industries will, in turn, drive the advancement of drone technology. However, taking wide-scale aerial imagery collection to the next level will come with its share of teething issues.
Scaling up for BVLOS
For UAV mapping and surveying businesses to push the current limits of efficiency and profitability, drone operations must go Beyond the Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS). BVLOS operations will be the key to unlocking the next level of large-scale drone mapping and surveying, thus allowing drones for commercial use to capture more significant amounts of data in fewer flights.
Under many jurisdictions, drone operations are limited mainly to visual line-of-sight (VLOS) in urban and rural areas, meaning that the aircraft can only travel at most around 500 meters away from their operators. Given that many mapping and surveying projects involve large areas of many square miles, this means that drone pilots must spend significant amounts of time relocating to different points and unpacking and repacking equipment.
BVLOS flight will remove many bottlenecks to productivity, simplify the mapping of vast areas and long corridors of land, and potentially pave the way for fully automated operations. Currently, scaling up for BVLOS is a complex process that involves many hoops to jump through.
Regulation and proving your case
The biggest hurdle facing the emerging BVLOS industry right now is regulation. While regulatory bodies around the world (the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), and others) have begun to approve BVLOS flights on a case by case basis, however only a tiny percentage of the requests received make it through to operational flight.
Due to the limited amount of data on the safety and success of BVLOS operations and the currently highly fluid state of development of regulations, a business looking to gain permission for BVLOS must present a specific and compelling safety case. Aviation regulators, already highly risk-averse, are playing it extra-safe with the disruptive technologies that will allow drones to scale up to limitless operations.
One of the critical concerns in assessing the safety of BVLOS drone flight is reliable connectivity. If you can assure that your long-range drone includes a failsafe communications system, especially for data gathering in urban areas and critical zones such as construction sites, your chances of gaining certification will increase significantly.
Halo – the key to safe and secure long-range operations
The mapping and surveying of large areas will mean that your drone will pass through various communications environments and contend with switching between different networks and protocols. Until now, no communications solution has been able to offer a robust way to deal with this challenge in a way that provides close to 100% connectivity and uptime.
Elsight’s Halo platform provides a powerful solution to the problem of failover and inconsistent communications. Automatically aggregating all the available networks (3G/4GLTE/5G*/RF) at any time in any location, the flexible, lightweight system utilizes SASE security through a secure communication tunnel that always selects the most suitable options for your needs. Halo’s unique Sixth Sense bonding capability constantly utilizes and monitors all available links, checking for compromised channels.
Halo will also provide BVLOS mapping and surveying drones with a reliable, efficient way to send captured data back to base or to a cloud computing center, allowing data to be processed even faster. For autonomous operations, Halo can also allow you to offload processing for functions such as navigation and detect-and-avoid to the cloud, thus reducing the SWaP footprint of your drone design.
As the industry adapts to the new demands arising from the need to scale up for BVLOS, now is the time to think about developing your certifiable drone platform. Whether you want to provide large-scale geospatial data collection, long-distance corridor mapping, or construction surveying, Elsight can help you seamlessly integrate Halo into your UAS unmanned platform, saving development time and costs and allowing you to be first to market.
FAQs
1. What is BVLOS, and why is it important for mapping and surveying?
BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) communication allows drones to operate beyond the pilot’s direct visual range using reliable communication and control systems. For mapping and surveying, BVLOS enables coverage of larger areas in a single flight, improves operational efficiency, reduces field deployment costs, and makes it practical to survey remote or difficult-to-access locations.
2. How does Elsight Halo maintain reliable connectivity during long-range BVLOS flights?
Halo aggregates multiple communication technologies, including LTE, 5G, Wi-Fi, mesh, and satellite links, into a single, resilient connectivity layer. The platform continuously monitors network health and dynamically reroutes traffic via the best available links, helping maintain uninterrupted command and control, telemetry, and mission data transmission throughout long range BVLOS operations.
3. Will using Halo help my organization obtain regulatory approval for BVLOS operations?
Reliable and redundant communications are a key component of most BVLOS approval processes. Halo supports operational requirements commonly evaluated by regulators, including communication resilience, failover capability, and secure, reliable command and control. Elsight also provides technical documentation and connectivity performance data to support BVLOS approval efforts.
4. Can Halo be integrated with my existing UAS hardware?
Yes. Halo is designed with low SWaP (Size, Weight, and Power) requirements and integrates with a wide range of UAV platforms, autopilots, mission computers, and payloads. The compact, 93-gram, palm-sized hardware has low power consumption and integrates via standard interfaces into the drone’s communication stack. It supports multiple SIMs and RF inputs, enabling multi-network bonding without significantly impacting payload or flight time.
5. What security and data protection features does Halo provide for transmitted drone data?
Halo uses AES-256-CBC encryption, VPN tunneling, and multilink packet distribution to protect command and control, telemetry, imagery, and mapping data during transmission. By distributing encrypted traffic across multiple communication links, Halo improves resilience against interception, network failure, and communication disruption while helping maintain secure BVLOS operations.
