The third GeoRabble Tas event was held on Thursday the 25th of September and we had a record 61 people register to attend. The event was held upstairs at The Republic Bar in Hobart and was sponsored by Lester Franks (thanks again, LF).

Presenters were excellent as usual. Presenters and presentations were as follows:

• Arko Lucieer spoke about the efforts of Terra Luma, which is a group organised out of UTAS that are researching unmanned aircraft system  (UAS) applications. He spoke about the difference between airborne LiDAR, structure from motion and their work comparing the two techniques, as well as a number of specific applications of UAS as a data capture platform.
• Adrian Fairfield, from Cohen and Associates, then spoke about projects that their platform had been working on, including capturing ortho-imagery across coastlines and other inhospitable areas.
• James Head-Mears showed us all the fancy close range point-cloud creation tools that Lester Franks use in order to capture a variety of data for a variety of applications, and he showed us the process of reverse engineering an army truck.
• Finally, Simon Allen wowed us with a great talk on getting results, with his SWAMP, or Shallow Water Autonomous Mapping Platform. The SWAMP is a robot boat, created with a few thousand dollars worth of off-the-shelf hardware, which was used to collect ground-truth or training data for a cloud-based machine learning algorithm, which then estimates the depth of the entire Derwent Estuary! (I think that’s it in a nutshell…) His more important point was that often a lot of time is spent developing the perfect solution to a problem, while it is often just fine to build an imperfect solution that might just work even better. It fits well into my little philosophy of ‘perfection is the enemy of the good.’

In summation, a lot of interest was piqued, some delicious food consumed and lots of catch-up occurred. It will happen again, soon, and so I’ll see you there at the next GeoRabble Tas.

– Alex